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Introducing small businesses to automated shipping technology is key to UPS's ability to serve efficiently millions of customers in China. "There's a huge group of mom-and-pop shops where business is still done by fax and phone," Choi says. "But it's an important market segment that we can't ignore. They feed up to the big distributors that in turn feed the multinationals." In some cases, UPS installs Web terminals at smaller customers that generate a lot of business. "We sometimes have to buy the equipment to make sure it's used," says T.H. Lin, UPS's VP for industrial engineering in Asia-Pacific. UPS runs seminars and conferences to educate business owners about the technology and its benefits.

UPS has developed and deployed Chinese-language versions of its WorldShip, QuantumView, and CampusShip shipping-management systems and has made them widely accessible to its customers through the Web. UPS also is working with Chinese businesses to help them standardize shipping data. Things a business client might do itself in other countries--such as cleaning up shipping data to verify addresses and avoid duplicates--Chinese companies sometimes expect UPS to do for them, Lin says. "In the U.S., if you ask people to clean up their shipping data, it's done. In China, everything is new to them," Lin says.

Multinationals are working hard to change that, so that their Chinese partners are comfortable not just with possessing the latest technology, but with using it to actually ring up higher sales and profits.

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