By You Nuo

BEIJING - In these days of crisis you don't often hear CEOs talk about growth, even less a growth rate that you thought only prime ministers of China and India could afford to aspire to (say higher than 10 percent).

But this was what Dave Senay, president and CEO of Fleishman-Hillard Inc, the global marketing communication and PR company, claimed in his latest trip to China about the company's business performance in the first quarter of 2010 - thanks primarily to robust growth coming out of Asia and other emerging economies.

The exact figure may be a happy surprise (only second to the best result in history, according to Senay), but the company seems to have been anticipating some such early gaining on both the human resource and strategic levels, Senay explained in an interview with China Business Weekly.

Fleishman-Hillard is part of the NYSE-listed Omnicom Group Inc, one of the largest global advertising, marketing and corporate communications companies.

On the human resource level, Senay said his company had the luxury of avoiding downsizing in a down time. Vacancies were created, but not for familiar faces in the PR industry who travel from one company to another like walking through revolving doors.

Instead, it recruited people with a wide variety of backgrounds, able to add value from different cultures to the company's worldwide relationship portfolio. A quarter of the new senior staff, as Fleishman-Hillard's China director pointed out, were from Asia.

There must, internally, have been some painful reshuffle, to replace older staff with young talent. But why must the company do that - to at least maintain a staff size as large as the pre-crisis days while beefing up its pool of expertise in a year when business, in Senay's word, "hesitated"? How could it be sure it was doing the right thing? How could it anticipate an earlier comeback in formerly unlikely parts of the world economy?

"We have to be where business is happening," Senay answered, pointing to the fact that two-thirds of Fleishman-Hillard's clients are also asking the firm to serve in more than one city in the world.

No growth, of course, can be one-sided, especially in the communication services and relationship management. New talents are bringing in new clients - nowadays not just from mature economies but many formerly unheard-of companies and brands in developing nations from East Asia to the subcontinent, and Latin American to the Middle East.