"Neusoft was founded at China's Northeastern University by only three people with three computers and 30,000 yuan, 16 years ago," Walter Fang, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Neusoft Group Ltd., said when telling Beijing Review the story of the growth of his company.

Neusoft is an IT service provider based in northeast China's Shenyang city. It now has 13,000 employees and its turnover reached 3.2 billion yuan (about $430 million) in 2006. Fang said that in the domestic market, Neusoft provides IT solutions for five major telecom operators and holds about 60 percent of the country's social security software market. Internationally, Neusoft can boast as being the largest outsourcing service provider in China. "We've laid a solid foundation in Japan, and now we're aiming to expand in Europe and the United States," said Fang.

Compared to those long-established big-name multinationals such as Microsoft, Neusoft is still an unknown in the world market. This kind of company is numerous in emerging economies, especially in Asia.

Yet it is also this kind of companies that pushed the World Economic Forum (WEF) to initiate its summer annual meeting in China--the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2007 held in Dalian on September 6-8, focused on these companies, in addition to the Davos winter summit targeted largely toward foremost multinationals.

These companies are called "global growth companies" by the WEF. According to WEF's website, global growth companies are a new generation of companies that will fundamentally change the global competitive landscape. They are at the core of being the "new champions" of the global economy.

These businesses come primarily from rapidly growing emerging markets, such as China and India, though also include fast movers from developed economies. Typical indicators of these companies are that they are expanding outside their traditional boundaries, experiencing strong growth rates, have revenues typically between $100 million and $5 billion, have demonstrated leadership in a particular industry and have an outstanding executive leadership.

In line with these requirements, Neusoft is a typical example, something that officially marks it as one of the global growth company partners of the WEF, the first grouping of this kind in the world.

At the WEF's Dalian meeting, Neusoft and its counterparts, domestic and foreign, were inevitably the subject of many panel discussions.

How should global growth companies, especially Chinese companies, tackle challenges they face as they pursue growth and internationalization? It was agreed upon by many panelists that having global views, constantly striving for innovation, nurturing core competitiveness, training qualified staff, and understanding local culture, are among the key elements needed to face these challenges.

Outstanding executive leadership is one of the indicators of global growth companies.

"Leaders of global growth companies should have global views, be innovative and assume responsibilities and risks," said Fang of Neusoft. "These three points are what Premier Wen Jiabao said when answering questions at the opening ceremony. I totally agree with him."