China’s firms have a glaring weakness as they face a barrage of EU probes

With their domestic profits narrowing and production capacity expanding, China’s firms are continuing to widen their overseas footprints in search of new, more lucrative markets. In this series, we examine China Inc.’s next phase of “going global” and the complex, challenging international environment its companies have chosen to enter.Not long ago, plans were in motion to build an enormous battery factory in the Belgian countryside. If completed, it would have created an estimated 2,000 jobs for the local economy and served as a flagship facility for a Chinese company expanding into the European market.But the project is now in limbo – not due to geopolitical tensions or a trade dispute between Beijing and Brussels, but a simple misunderstanding. The Chinese firm only recently discovered that salaries in Belgium are indexed to inflation, an added cost that was not made clear in its original feasibility study.