Then we toured the Suzhou-Singapore Business complex. The two countries are working together in a sort of joint venture to help create business opportunities.
Lunch was underwhelming. As usual. We had a soup that had a creature in it native only to the Suzhou region. It looked like a salamander/eel. I did not try it. I feel like the restaurants are somewhat offended when we don’t eat all of the food but first of all they give us waaay too much, and second they rarely even tell us what the dishes are. We eat the things that look edible and familiar but only sometimes try the odd looking dishes.
The other night I had a chicken and vegetable dish. It was a bit spicy, but the meet had a lot of bones in it and was gross. At one point I was scooping food from the pot to my plate and found chicken feet chilling in the pot. I quickly lost what little appetite I had left. Contrary to popular belief, canine is not a menu item regularly found. Its apparently an expensive delicacy and the locals wouldn’t waste it by putting it into a foreigners meal randomly, so it would have to be ordered. Some members of the group did find it and try it at some point. It looked gross. I also did not try this.
After lunch we visited MY corporate champion from last year, Rich Products! We had a presentation on the company from a big whig…GM of Rich’s China. THEN we had one of their chef’s prepare THREE cakes for us. Two of the students helped. Then we ate them. It was delicious. I was in a VERY good mood then. It made the bus ride back much more bearable. I slept and read a bit.
Watching BBC news now…a pipe burst in the yellow river here in China so they are telling residents not to use water from the river. Sounds good, but the spill happened Wednesday, and they just released the information today. Fail.
Tuesday would have been almost a perfect day except for the cold. I thought Shanghai was supposed to be warmer!?! The problem is that very few establishments heat their buildings, be they offices or restaurants, everything seems to be at a cozy 50 degrees. We first visited SMIC, which is a Chinese firm that manufacturers electrical conductors. They are like Intel but not as advanced. In their presentation they spoke on their strategy of being a late mover into the market. They pretty much just wait for other companies to develop products then copy the designs. They just settled an intellectual property lawsuit for US 200 million. They’ve been in business for 10 years and their only year of profitability has been 2004, when they basically manipulated their product line in order to be profitable. Glad that business plan is working out for them! Hey, at least they like their company culture! Their original CEO (who had to leave due to the lawsuit) founded the company to produce conductors and spread Christianity to China, looks like he’s succeeded at neither! Which reminds me…side note from the other day…During the cultural revolution religion was illegal and such, but now the Chinese are allowed to practice four religions only…Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism aaand I can’t remember the fourth. Just a fun fact.
Another fun fact, have I mentioned how enormous China is? Learned today there are 238 cities with over 1 million people. TWO HUNDRED THIRTY EIGHT CITIES. That’s just insane. They also have the largest municipality in the world…I believe its called the Gangzou Province and it has 38 million people under its jurisdiction.
I do love hearing how China has the ‘most’ and ‘biggest’ of everything. OF COURSE YOU DO, you have a population of 1.3 BILLION people!!!
Anyways directly after the SMIC presentation a guy named Kent spoke to us about strategies for entry into China. He runs a consulting firm that he founded in 1985. He describes himself as a ‘China addict’ I would sure hope so if he’s been here for 25 years. Kent was VERY knowledgeable and gave some great advice for us if we were to ever decide to jump into the China biz. Unlikely for me, but you never know.
Lunch was held at the Pu Dung (new Shanghai) Shangri-la. As in, the world class hotel chain Shangri-la. It was magnificent. We had the CEO of HSBC China (no big deal) speak to us for about an hour and a half. He was really really cool. And British. So even if he wasn’t talking about really interesting things his accent would have been entertaining enough just to listen to. But it turned out to be a double bonus. He was very genuine and made banking actually seem somewhat interesting. It was funny to learn that the financial markets are actually highly regulated in China (as well as stock market being government controlled). The banks actually have more restrictions than U.S. Firms. For example, they can only lend $80 for every $100 deposited. This being the opposite of what happened with Lehman brothers in the US, where they were loaning way more money than they had. Nice work on this one, China.
After lunch we had a presentation at GM Shanghai, which is a joint venture between GM and the Chinese (government run) car company SAIC. We actually did a case on the joint venture in class so we knew a bit about them going in. The case was about when GM first entered China, it had to have a partner, and SAIC was the largest firm available for this type of business in China so they teamed up 50/50 in the joint venture. SAIC didn’t have any car models of their own coming in, nor did they know anything about making cars. GM would teach them how to make cars and together they would manufacture and sell them. What ended up happening is the plans for vehicles “got leaked” to SAIC (intellectual property transfer was not part of the agreement) and GM sort of got the short stick. They did end up resolving it and have been happily married ever since, but SAIC is going to break away from GM at some point and inevitably become the largest manufacturer of cars in the world, using the knowledge gained from GM. GM knew this going in (as our presenter told us today), but GM has made $3 billion (50% of the 6 billion revenue made) so far. Basically GM could have sat on the sidelines and SAIC would have eventually gotten manufacturing knowledge anyways, and GM wouldn’t have been cashing in on the Chinese market at all.
Seeing a trend in this thievery by Chinese government? Me too. It seems if in China if you can’t beat em (stop them from stealing), join em (jump into the market). I would really like to get Kent (consulting firm from today) together with the lawyer we met with in Beijing last week. While they both acknowledge the problems with regulation, one is very optimistic the other quite the opposite idea of how the successful China will be with the limitations of its corrupt government.
So far so good I suppose, Goldman Sachs just projected an 11% increase in GDP for China in 2010.
Maybe the U.S. will have positive growth.
-R-
p.s. they are still playing (American) Christmas music here. Its entertaining.
Pictures include Shuzhou-Singapore industrial center, Rich’s, up close and personal with downtown giant buildings (the two are affectionately known as bottle and bottle opener…see earlier pics from far away to understand the bottle opener….it was the one that is the second tallest in the world), and Shangri-la atrium
just realized i can make comments. i have been laughing at pretty much everything you are writing. i especially love the picture of you looking so serious at the business desk!
ReplyDeleteremind me to never visit china. i would starve.