Background
Yang Guoping was born in 1959 in Shanghai, China.
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Guoping Yang
Edit Profile国平 杨
Yang is the president of Shanghai Dazhong Transportation Group, one of China’s prime taxi companies, based in Shanghai. The company was founded in 1988 and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 1992 as Dazhong Taxi. It changed its name to Dazhong Transportation (DZT) in 1999. Through its subsidiaries, the company also engages in automotive maintenance, home moving, real estate development, car leasing, hotel services, and advertising.
Education
He received an MBA degree in 1997 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Career
Taxi services in Shanghai were disorganized in the 1980s, and passengers were often charged unreasonable fares. DZT was established by the then mayor of Shanghai, Zhu Rongji, who called for a reform of the city’s taxi services. (Zhu became premier of China between 1998 and 2003.) DZT turned out to be the cornerstone of Yang’s achievements. Before he was entrusted to lead the company in 1988 as the general manager, Yang had held a party-appointed post in the Shanghai Gas Company (1976–83), the Shanghai Yangshupu Gasworks (1983–84), the Shanghai Public Utilities Administration Bureau (1984) and the Shanghai Taxi Company (1984–88). He received an MBA degree in 1997 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Responsiveness, accessibility, punctuality, cleanness, politeness and reasonable fares’ were among the standards that Yang set the taxi service when he joined DZT. Although these service criteria seem to be basic, it took DZT about 20 years to implement them. In 1988, the company secured a loan of RMB65 million to buy 500 Volkswagen Santanas as taxis, and it invested in another 200 vehicles the next year. It introduced Volkswagen Passats in 2000 and began to use Mercedes-Benz cars in 2004. Nonetheless, 45 of the total 100 Mercedes-Benz cars were pulled from service in 2006. Excessively high operat- ing costs were cited as the main reason for the phasing out. Yang then limited the car brands to Santana and Passat. Apart from the car brand, Yang has taken several other measures to make DZT a top-rated taxi service provider. In 1995, DZT’s taxis were equipped with IC card machines to enable passengers to pay using the IC card allowed by DZT. As early as 1998, some taxis were fitted with GPS to provide satellite positioning, radio connections, and computerized dispatching. The intention was to cut passengers’ waiting time. The drivers should also feel more secure because of built-in safety devices. The GPS was upgraded to a general packet radio service (GPRS) in 2002.
Yang has also grown the business through acquisitions and geographical expansion. The taxi industry in Shanghai was highly fragmented in the 1980s, and the following decade saw considerable consolidation to allow for the generation of economic scale. In the 1980s DZT’s revenue per taxi was stable at about RMB30000 per annum. In 1996, when the Shanghai municipal government stopped issuing taxi licenses, Yang realized that DZT should acquire other smaller firms and expand outside Shanghai in order to improve its earnings. Consequently, DZT gained control over Harbin Dazhong Communication and Technology in 1996. It acquired 80 percent of the state-owned shares of Harbin Swan Taxi in 2004. The acquisitions added considerable numbers of taxi units to DZT’s existing portfolio while consolidating its position as a major taxi service provider in Harbin city, Heilongjiang. Between 1992 and 2004, Yang established DZT’s presence in ten different cities.
Achievements
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As China is rapidly transitioning from a planned to a market economy, the ongoing radical environment and conceptual changes have left many domestic firms languishing in the dust. Yang intends to foster DZT into one of the world’s top-notch taxi companies. This sets the firm’s competitive core and strategic position. Looking forward with confidence, Yang intends that DZT driver teams should be good ambassadors for Shanghai when the city holds the World Expo in 2010.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
Career
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1976 - 1983
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1994