Southeast Asia Chemical New Materials Base: Building a Localised Team from Scratch
For a Chinese group's new Southeast Asia base, we built a 120+ localised management, technical and operations team across three phases — mid-to-senior posts seconded from China and execution-level roles hired locally — with attrition below the local industry average.
Project Background
The client was building a chemical new materials production base outside mainland China, spanning utilities, core process units and warehousing and logistics. It needed a localised team that understood both the group's standards and local labour law, while key posts (plant director, discipline managers) had to accept secondment from China. With no local hiring entity in place, the client lacked local channels and employment experience.
Client Challenges
- A greenfield site with no brand recognition had weak pull for local mid-to-senior talent
- Group technical standards required a bilingual team to bridge, so purely local hiring could not satisfy management-level requirements
- Unfamiliarity with local labour law, the union environment and pay structures risked misjudging employment costs
- No mechanism yet existed for Chinese expatriates' visas, family arrangements and rotations
- Filling 120+ roles at once required a hiring cadence matched to the engineering schedule and production launch plan
KUTA's Approach
Local recruitment set up on the ground
Built local recruitment channels and a talent pool in the target country covering mainstream job platforms, industry associations and vocational schools, staffing execution-level roles predominantly with local hires.
Cross-border search for critical posts
Critical posts such as plant director and unit managers were filled with managers with comparable-unit experience seconded from China, with KUTA handling all assignment formalities.
Compensation and compliance benchmarking
Issued per-role local salary bands, tax rates and total employment cost estimates to reduce labour risk and support the client's internal approval process.
Three-phase delivery management
Recruitment rolled forward in phases aligned to construction, commissioning and production, with weekly dashboards tracking acceptance, mobilisation and 90-day retention so gaps could be backfilled promptly.