5
Nov
In the News: Transfinder Expands to China
- Category Featured, Announcements
From Albany Business Review
November 5, 2015
By
Needing more software programmers than it can find locally, Transfinder Corp. opened an office in Shanghai this week.
“It’s an important step for the company,” CEO and President Antonio Civitella said, in talking about the effect the move will have on Transfinder, which maps bus routes for school systems across the country.
Civitella said he had put off the decision to open the China office as long as possible, preferring to fill more jobs at its downtown Schenectady headquarters. But the shortage of qualified workers was hindering Transfinder’s ability to keep up with its sales growth.
Transfinder has 80 employees working in its Schenectady offices, up from 60 two years ago. Transfinder added 200 clients this year and increased sales by some 25 percent, Civitella said.
The company broke the $10 million mark in revenue in 2014 and has already surpassed that this year.
Transfinder has sponsored scholarships to local high school students. It has paid up to $10,000 to foreign workers to cover visa costs and it has been recruiting aggressively. Yet, the company continues to have unfilled positions.
Ultimately, Transfinder executives decided to open an office where there were more available workers. That led them to Shanghai, where the company has eight employees working in a downtown office.
“Recruiting is so much easier over there,” Civitella said. “The people are smart. They speak perfect English.
“We give the exact tests we give to employees in Schenectady. No different.”
Transfinder officials spent 10 months working with Chinese authorities to get all the governmental approvals necessary. That included finding a name for the subsidiary the government liked.
One of the software programmers hired for the Shanghai office was a Chinese national working in Holland, and another Chinese national was in Australia. The new Transfinder venture allowed them to return to their home country.
Civitella said he was not deterred by concerns his company’s source code could be vulnerable in China.
“Our source code is vulnerable here in Schenectady,” he said, “and if a competitor steals the source code, what are they going to do with it?
“If you had 100 percent of the code, you need other pieces. You need to market it, service your clients and to be able to sustain it. They don’t have any clients.”
But like all tech CEOs, it is a major concern for him.
“Does that keep us up at night? Sure it does, but that is not a reason not to do it in China," Civitella said.
The company opened an office in Austin, Texas, earlier this year. Texas is the second-largest market for the company.
The China office is the first of what Civitella says will be more international ventures for his company.
“We are now looking at every place in the world. In a matter of time, we’ll have offices all over the world," he said.
While China is fertile ground for software programmers, it is not a promising market for Transfinder’s signature product of school bus routing software. Most school children in China and other countries use public transportation to get to school.
Transfinder is looking to expand its product lineup beyond school bus routing and develop software for municipalities, such as sanitation trucks, which might give the company a more global market.
To do that, the company needs even more software programmers.
“Clearly we are still hiring here,” Civitella said. “We want to grow both.”
The company has gone to great lengths to find the talent locally, Civitella said. Transfinder has sponsored the visas of three employees at the cost of up to $10,000 per employee.
“I don’t think it is just the Capital Region. I think it is the whole country. There are pockets (communities with a stronger labor force). I don’t want to just pick up and leave," Civitella said.
The job market for skilled tech workers is so tight, he said, companies in the region are constantly trading employees.
“The last couple of years it has been getting harder and harder to find them,” he said. “It is not just this region.
“Eventually the market has to do something about this supply.”
