The Ending

Ni Hao Journal,

I neglected to write to you during my last few days in China. We were incredibly busy and to be honest, I didn't want to spend the remainder of my time abroad "blogging". I have been back in Seattle for just over a day and have been reflecting a lot about my experience.

Before I get to my final observations on China, let me catch you up with our final days and company visits in Shanghai.

We visited Pacific Market International. I had little knowledge about this company outside of briefly talking with their CEO, Rob Harris, at the 2007 Albers Mentor Fair. PMI makes the mugs you see in all the Starbucks shop. They have also acquired Stanley and Aladdin - separate drink cup companies. Qin Chen, managing director of their Shanghai office was there to greet us and give us a tour of the offices. Qin was very enthusiastic to host us and did a good job putting together a variety of speakers from within his office. Kind of cool was the fact that an SU MBA Alum from a few years back was working in the Shanghai office as Director of International Marketing (I think that was his role). It gave me a little hope that I could get to working abroad in Asia - TJ was a Westerner and most of the people I met working in China had spoke Mandarin. The one thing that made me wonder about PMI was their marketing plan. We asked about their marketing research abroad and it didn't sound like they did a lot of it. One of their marketing managers indicated they had a "feeling" their product would be successful in China based off of the success of other products (not similar) in that region. Seems like a risky assessment to me...

After PMI we went to Shanghai Goss. I had never previously heard of this company but they actually are a pretty decent size. Their primary business is producing printing presses for newspapers. To give you an idea of their scale, they supply the New York Times with their presses. They used to have their factories in the Midwest USA but acquired the factory in Shanghai a few years back. I felt like our tour of Goss provided a more realstic look at what a Chinese factory looked like than Black and Decker and Andrew Telecomunications. The Goss factory, while didn't appear unsafe, was not as clean or comfortable as B&D or Andrew. Also, they were more traditional in their ways, i.e. - only women control the cranes above (apparently this is common though). I think the look at a more common factory setting (less sterilized) was the most I got out of this visit. I did find it interesting but overall the company does not fall into my interest set.

Our last two visits were at a US Consulate in Shanghai. This included the US Commercial Service and Thompson Market Services (TMS). The US Commercial Service is a wing of the government which helps US companies begin operations abroad. One of the diplomats spoke to us about their mission and Americans doing business in China. I had never heard of the Commercial Service and was impressed with the scope of services they offer. Essentially, if a US company is interested in doing business abroad they could go to their local Commercial Service office and then get information on doing business in their desired company. The US Commercial Service will do some of the due-dilligence required for market entry such as identifying interest in the market and providing a list of resources (lawyers, etc) to the US company. This is all available for a small fee. Like I said, I never heard of these services being offered - the whole process really seemed pretty basic and straightforward. If I decide to eventually do business abroad I can definitely see myself taking advantage of their services.

Our final speaker/company visit was with TMS - they followed the US Commercial Service. We didn't actually go to their offices but they came to consulate. Apparently, Bill Thompson usually comes to speak but this year he couldn't. Instead he has one of his associates come. Unfortunately, this was a very poor presentation that last about an hour. Most of it was a Chinese government propaganda video about anti-piracy efforts. The rest of his speech was him reading word for word from his powerpoint presentation and not making eye contact. Luckily, Madhu cut him off after an hour and that was it! I wish we could've ended on a better note but overall I think Madhu did a great job putting together a diverse set of company visits in China that provided us all with plent of insight.

I will do a quick follow-up posts with some key oberservations I took away from China.