Monday was our first part of the educational program. We started in the morning in the hotel conference room with a presentation from David Wolf from Wolf Group Asia, a consulting firm providing strategic communications counsel to companies in innovative and creative industries. Mr. Wolf was a very dynamic and interesting speaker. He has been doing business in China and living in China for the past 17 years. He started his presentation with “In China everything is possible…nothing is easy.” Then he gave an example of how a client asked him to reserve the equivalent of the Capitol Building in China for a dinner and needed an answer in 20 minutes. Mr. Wolf’s wife, Chinese born, got it done. Everything is possible…nothing is easy. Some of what he talked about was contradictory to what I’ve learned from my preparation for the trip. For example, before leaving for China I learned about Guanxi and how it is probably the most important thing in doing business in China. However, Mr. Wolf acknowledged that Guanxi was that important, but he sees thing moving in the direction where Guanxi will not be enough to succeed in China. However, like many others, Mr. Wolf also agrees that China still need to make more socio-political changes and to innovate to stay on the growth path. He also talked about the Little Emperors, which I though was interesting. Because of the birth control laws in China, a family can only have one child, which created a new generation of single childs with two parents and four grand-parents attending to the Little Emperors. Mr. Wolf also recommended that the best products to import into Chine is luxury goods for two reasons. There is a rapidly growing number of millionaires in China and you just can’t compete on price with the Chinese on anything else. One little bit of fact he said that I though was interested is two third of all the world’s construction cranes are in China. So just that shows how rapidly the country is growing.
The second presentation at the hotel was from Ms. Manuela Reintgen from Dezan Shira and Associates, a consulting firm that provides pre-incorporation regulatory and tax advice. Her presentation was more of a “textbook” presentation. She only had a little over two years of experience, but still very informative. She talked about the potential conflict of doing business in China, such as time – time is not money in China, relations – again she emphasized the importance of Guanxi, dealing with conflicts – the Chinese are not confrontational they want to ensure harmony. She also talked about the different types of legal structuring to start doing business in China, such as Joint Venture, Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprises, agents and more, and she talked about the risks of doing each of them. Her information was definitely very practical.
After the 2 presentations, we only had 45 minutes to go get lunch before we had to get on the bus. Leaving us very little time and no idea how to say “to go” or “we’re in a hurry” in Chinese, a few of us opted for McDonald’s. I wanted to avoid Western food, but given the situation and I also believe I should try McDonald’s in every country I go to, we didn’t have much choice!
After lunch, we went to Lenovo R&D center for a tour of their office and a presentation from an American marketing and communication manager. The tour of the R&D center was a presentation area prepared for group tour to go through the history of the company and see the product evolution. It was interesting, but I would have rather seen the actual production line, which was a mile down the road. At first I didn’t think they would have a plant that near to Beijing, but when they said the plant was down the road, I was a little disappointed we didn’t get to go see that. After the tour, we had the presentation from the American manager. He told us that when he first moved to Beijing, and for the next six years, he had to live in the Lenovo doors, where he shared a room equipped with six metal bunk beds and shared 2 washing machines between 100 people. Why would anyone want to do that? I wonder why people decide to move so far overseas and have to live in much more difficult conditions than back home…answer to come.
After the Lenovo visit, which ended an hour late, we had no time for dinner, so we all rushed back to our hotel room to change to go to a Kong Fu show. I was agreeably impressed with the quality of the show. On my first trip to China, we went to an acrobatic show and this poor lady fell from where ever she was perched and the tray of glasses she was balancing on her hand or her head, well turned out to be a tray to plastic glasses all glued together. It kind of ruined the show!
After the show, we came back to the hotel, some people went out, of course, some, including me, went to bed.
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