(ECNS) - A survey of CEOs in business startups found that doing overtime is the new normal as about 67 percent work 12 hours a day among other challenges.
The report, released by online recruitment website Zhipin.com and entrepreneurial service platform Krspace.cn, researched the lifestyle of 12,087 CEOs in startup companies that finished series C rounds of fundraising or before.
Over nine percent of CEOs worked more than 16 hours a day, twice the legal working hours in China, and have been under stress for a long time, said the report.
It also showed that nearly 80 percent of startup CEOs slept less than seven hours a day, lower than the healthy recommendation. Among these, more than 90 percent worked in the more competitive first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Over 75 percent work in the IT and Internet industries, which are developing rapidly.
The survey found that 33 percent of CEOs in startups chose not to receive a salary, and the same proportion only drew a symbolic basic salary. Only ten percent of CEOs have a salary reaching market level or slightly higher than the company average. More than half of all CEOs participating in the survey still lived in rented houses.
In the survey, 77 percent said that labor costs were the biggest expense, followed by R&D investment and marketing costs. Some 52 percent of CEOs said that they needed to control rental costs.
More than half of the CEOs said they were most worried about a break of the capital chain during business development, followed by a shortage of talent and veering off course from developing trends.
