Luis Alfredo Zambrano ’13
My Experience
The project’s objective was to formulate and fine-tune a strategy for leveraging the rural distribution network of one of China’s biggest telecom operators to provide profitable mobile payments to a couple hundred millions of rural customers. This involved updating existing plans to accommodate the current regulatory landscape and possible partnerships, and identifying and sizing the actual business opportunity. Another part of the project had to do with analyzing future cross-selling opportunities and the initial rollout strategy, as well as the following execution phases.
This project fits ESP’s mission in that it is part of their “Decentralized Distribution (DD)” and “Financial Products (FP)” lines of projects. These lines, together with other two lines, allow ESP’s strategic areas to have a significant impact on the income and assets of low-income people.
Many skillsets learned in the MBA were relevant for this project and put into practice at its different stages. First, a lot of demographic information and internal country statistics had to be processed in order to get a solid understanding of the current situation in China, with data to back it up. Second, accounting concepts were relevant when analyzing annual reports of several companies. Apart from these, strategic analyses were done to understand competitive advantages of the client and thus be able to define the best strategy, while other courses, like operations, allowed for a lot of insight on the way the client does business.
Now after finishing my summer internship, and knowing how the skills learnt in the MBA apply to the workplace, I am able to choose my courses for the second year with this in mind, making me confident that the classes will apply when I join a firm in a full-time position.
Working for a Chinese compan, while being in the US was very challenging. This was the first time I truly understood the magnitude of size for a growing enterprise in China. This was a company that had hundreds of millions of customers but was still trying to expand its business. This was the type of exposure that can only be gained when working for a company in a country like China. However, it also became frustrating when the information I needed was only in Chinese, since it is a language I don’t understand.
But learning about China’s geography, cultural richness and diversity, internal dynamics, regulatory and political environments, struggles, and history all added to a very interesting summer internship experience. Learning about all these things wouldn’t have been necessary if the project took place in a country I knew better, and while the extra effort was challenging and time consuming, it was interesting and worth the extra time invested. China is one of the world’s biggest economies and I now feel better prepared to do business there, which is not far from likely.
On the professional level, I feel more confortable with what I have learned at Columbia Business School now that I have put them into practice. I saw the value that my education adds to my capacity to be critical in a given situation. I also feel more confident about my ideas, and about the impact they can have. I also had a great mentor in ESP, which enhanced the experience so much.
On the personal level, I saw during the summer that my work will actually have a GREAT impact on millions of people whose lives will become a bit better. This experience confirmed to me that, through technology, we could enable new mechanisms to improve people's lives by providing access and then providing services. This idea is something that is embedded in the reason I came to business school, and through this experience, I can continue my journey with the confidence that technology will keep on being part of our lives, and that it can serve for a bigger purpose.
