When arriving on Monday evening I was invited for dinner at the hotel by our HR manager Henri together with his team. The day after that was spent on a presentation of the company and plant tour. Elkem is a 50/50 owner of the filtration plant together with a local company called Erdos, which is the sole owner of the world's largest ferrosilicon plant with a total of 48 large furnaces (from where we take the smoke and filtrate it, quality test and pack it before delivering it as finished product to China and other countries). Erdos originally made its fortune in kashmir, but has diversified into coal power plants, chemicals, metals, etc. They even own the hotel I stayed at! Our plant was impressingly well ordered with tools put in their right places and a generally clean appearance - for someone who's been on internal course in Elkem Business System and learnt the importance of things being put in place, waste being reduced and processes being under control, I was glad to see this. We do not have different standards for different parts of the world. This is not to say that HSE (health, security, environment) is not an issue - culturally we in Elkem come from a very different angle than most Chinese companies. For example, Elkem has introduced 4-shift work weeks (meaning that people work only 8 hours a day 5 days a week) on the contrary to previously when the schedule was run on 3-shift work weeks (employees worked 8 hours every day). A big effort has also gone into learning and convincing people the importance of wearing the right work clothes including helmets and glasses. Another issue has been the chaotic and dangerous traffic with frequent accidents outside the plant area, which of course is even harder to control and improve than things that happen within our plant area.
Landscape picture and view from a distance over Qipanjing Industrial Park
The environment is of course a big issue. This is a very polluted area with many heavy industrial companies present, particulary mining and coal power plants. Elkem operates a filtration plant, which improves the environment, but when going by car to the airport one can't help being a bit sad when viewing all the polluting plants and the smog in the air. I choose to be optimistic though, the investments bring necessary capital to the area and there is a pressure both from the Chinese government and international companies to improve on environmental issues.
On a lighter note by the way, I was surprised to learn that 60% of our employees in the JV are women!
Talking of lighter notes... now it's Friday afternoon here and soon time to go home and get ready to go to some friends' "hobby rock-band" concert later tonight! = )
