Tuesday, we had plans to go to visit Alcan, but the visit got cancelled because the person receiving us was sick. Instead, we had Mr. Gilbert, managing director of Beijing Global Strategy Consulting Co., Ltd. come speak to us at the hotel. He was involved in a few ways in the Beijing 2008 Olympics. He had a lot of interesting things to say, coming from someone that has lived through the 30 year boom in China. He has been in China since 1980. He first went through the changes in China from 1980 to today. In 1980, there was practically nothing possible. As an immigrant to China, he wasn’t allowed to have contacts with locals. After 8pm, everything was dead, no entertainment, nothing. The main thing that struck me, given my industry background and interest, is that the Chinese consumers in the large European cities account for 50% of the luxury market. And the wealthy Chinese consumer average age is well below the average age of the wealthy consumers in the U.S and Europe. To me, this is important about the luxury market because even if I never export to China, I would still need to heavily cater to the Chinese people.
After the presentation at the hotel, we ran to the mall to get lunch. I went to the actual food court part, not international food court like we’re used to, Chinese food court. I managed to find something that looked decent from the plastic food models. Then our bus took us to the Beijing train station to catch a speed train out of town. The train station was really impressive, it looked like a modern airport. And the train was pretty cool too. It went up to 300km/h or 200mph and our ride was only 13 minutes. Once there, we went to visit Lights Medical Manufacture. They develop and manufacture alcohol pad, and swabs, and hold a 50% market share in the U.S. We first had a presentation on the company and then visited their facilities. That was cool, we got to see everything: the lockers where they keep all the samples where we saw some Walgreen alcohol pads, the labs where they develop and test the products, the factory where they produce and print the foil envelopes for the pads and swabs, the machines doing the production, the workshop where the machines are built. All their machines used in production are created and built on site. Pretty impressive. The company was very welcoming to our group and even had a banner outside welcoming us. Light has just recently merged with a pharmaceutical company and the manager of that pharmaceutical company is a Chinese-born Canadian. He studied in Ontario and lived in Toronto for many years.
After the tour we had a few minutes before we boarded our train, so we stopped at the new mall in front of the train station. This mall is an outdoor mall and from the street you can only see the back of the buildings because they are facing inwards and just from the architecture of the mall I could tell it was an outlet mall!!! It looked like Woodberry Commons! Nobody really bought anything because luxury is more expensive here, especially with the 17% VAT (tax). So we got back on the speed train back to Beijing.
Our bus dropped us at Switch Grill where we had an informal happy hour with Rutgers Beijing students and Alumni. Rutgers has an EMBA program in Beijing and Shanghai and the professors from the U.S. go to China for a week and teach a class. The structure is the same as the EMBA in the U.S., one weekend a month and a couple nights a month, so a full course is over in a week. I met Stephan, a French Canadian from Joliette! He graduated from the EMBA Beijing in 2009. The restaurant, Switch Grill, was also owned by a Canadian! It was mostly American food, so we ate a burger, mmmm! After the restaurant, we went back to the hotel and packed for our early departure for Shanghai for the next day.
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