Environmental and business thinking in one

Just a short post now when being back in Shanghai again, since I promised to post some photos from the journey. Actually I (un-intentionally) lied to you when writing this, because when browsing the photos I've taken there is really just one that I think is of good enough quality to make it to this blog. For those of you who have been to Kuala Lumpur you will probably recognize the Petronas Towers!

What you might not know is that Elkem has delivered microsilica to the construction of this building. Microsilica is a product that is captured from the smoke at silicon metal plants. Before Elkem invented filters for the smoke some 25 years ago all silicon plants - including our own which was the reason for trying to solve it - around the world polluted the air with it. After designing the filters we actually found out that the "powderish" microsilica gives a lot of benefit for the strenght of concrete and some other materials. This is good environmental and business thinking in one according to me!

This is also one of the reasons that I like working in an industrial company. Even though research runs may take long time and the products may not be as visible or "sexy" as consumer goods tend to be or at least are viewed as, innovations tend to get a large effect on the world, the business is often very international and customer relationships typically longlasting, which all are aspects that I like in my job.

From 30 degrees plus to 15 minus

This week I have been in Malaysia and Thailand for work, meeting potential customers for the two projects I'm working with together with colleagues from the offices in Norway, Singapore and Bangkok. The opportunity to meet colleagues from other offices after having spent quite some time mailing each other back and forth regarding the projects is of course a nice aspect of travelling! Now when working and living in a region with cultures others than my own I really get the chance to think about how background (not the least my own) influences ones behavior. And that "Asia" can not be viewed as "one culture", on the contrary Chinese colleagues and friends have argued that China in itself is as diverse as Europe with several languages, types of food, attitudes... The only common link I've found business-wise in the Asian (southeast/east) countries versus (west) Europe is that things are allowed to take more time since it is more important that the parts have trust for each other also on a personal level. I was told that sometimes in Southeast Asian countries people will take it as offensive if you push the importance of a written contract too hard, since they think that if you have had a relation for some while, trust should be built up and some flexibility is expected from both sides. Quite different from our very "efficient and rational" way of thinking about business here..!

Since I have meetings in Norway next week I flow directly from Kuala Lumpur with almost 35 degrees heat to Oslo where I was met some 15 hours later in the early morning by -15 degrees!

I will post some photos from this journey when back in Shanghai again since I forgot to bring the camera cable... But for this time I would like to share some photos I took during the Chinese New Year week, two weeks ago.

From left to right: Sisters sightseeing in Shanghai with the famous skyline in the background. We took a 3-hour harbour cruise and never got out of the harbour, even though much of the activity is moved to a deep-sea harbour at an artificial island some distance outside Shanghai!With my logistics background I of course had to take pictures of some of the vessels and was a bit disappointed that we never reached the new harbour.... Far away from modern Shanghai - one of the many water villages in the Yangtze delta. Those who have seen Mission Impossible 3 may recognize that a similar village was the setting for the end scenes - it's called Xitang and is located only a short distance from this one called Wuzhen.

Time for weekend and sleeping off the jetlag in snowy Oslo. Perhaps it's time to call my Stabburet-boyfriend and ask him to take some Grandiosa with him for dining in tonight? ; )

Preparations for the second New Year 2009!

China is even more bustling with energy than usual these days because next week the Chinese will celebrate the year's most important holiday - the Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival or Lunar New Year. All offices are closed for the whole week and people go home to their families and celebrate with lots of traditional food, visiting relatives and sending up enormous amounts of fireworks into the sky on the Eve, which falls on this coming Sunday. In skyscrape-filled Shanghai my sister (who's coming to visit me) and I must find a high place from where we can see the light show!

This means however that this week and last week have been even more intense than usual in the Elkem Shanghai office. Last week all salesmen were out visiting customers, wishing them happy new year and toasting to their continued success. This week everyone is working hard to finish their tasks on time. I'm working mainly on two different projects, both are related to mapping potential customers for new products/applications. Until now it has been a lot of desktop job, and also some collaboration with our other offices in Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangkok...) , but I'm looking forward to actually visiting the first customers which I'm doing together with two of our technical sales guys (or actually, one of them is a woman) in a few weeks time, when we are going to Malaysia.

Before Christmas I visited our research lab in Beijing, and also got the chance to have a meeting with one of the professors in the China Building Materials Academy. The photo of me in front on the academy building was taken by our very nice lab manager Lin.

Even though Christmas is not celebrated except by the department stores and the Christian minority in China, we still had a company Christmas party. The photos show the happy Elkem crew in Shanghai and the excellent Norwegian and (mainly) Chinese food we enjoyed in that evening= )

Today after work I'm going for dinner with one of the girls in the office, Cindy. We had a dinner some weeks ago and found out that we have to continue a very interesting discussion on differences and similarities between Chinese and European culture... it's not a topic that you can finish easily!

Introduction of myself and being a trainee in Elkem

Hello! I'm a new blogger at Orklajobs.com so I will, just like my fellow bloggers, take the opportunity to introduce myself. I was hired as a trainee in Elkem in May 2007, shortly after graduating from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden with a degree in Industrial Engineering and management. The reason for me to apply for a position in Elkem was actually that Orkla was one of the few Norwegian companies I knew something about since before (and to all fellow clueless Swedes out there - Norway is actually a very nice country to work and live in= ) , but I also knew that I wanted to work in an industrial company. Hence, I looked up the industrial companies in the Orkla group and found that Elkem offered a 2-year trainee programme that sounded to fit me well. Scroll time ahead a couple of weeks and some interviews later, and I was already started at my first trainee position, in the business development department at the headquarters in Oslo.

The first eight months passed quickly with analyses of various customer segments, raw material markets, internal projects etc. At that time I changed to a position within the Aluminium division (for those not in the know, Elkem has 8 divisions: Silicon, Foundry, Solar, Energy, Research, Materials, Carbon and Aluminium, the latter just sold to Alcoa which leaves us with 7) where I worked with logistics projects, mainly in order to improve out-going logistics flows from the two Norwegian plants via the distribution centre in Rotterdam to the customers. Another eight months later it was time to change again, and I started in the Materials division where I am currently working, based in the sales & purchasing office in Shanghai.

I arrived in Shanghai early November last year, but I am still amazed by the size, the noise, the opportunities, the number of people everywhere... More about what it is like to work and live here, I will save for my next post. Let me just say a few things about myself since I claimed that I would introduce not only my job but also, yes right, myself in this post.

I'm 26 years old, grew up in the picturesque small village Kivik by the southeast coastline in Sweden, moved to Gothenburg when I was 18 to start at the technical university and lived there until I moved to Oslo in 2007, with the exception of an exchange year in lovely hot Singapore. And here comes the hard part when you are supposed to talk about your "hobbies"... so what should I say? I like travelling, spending time with friends and my boyfriend Carl (who "by co-incidence" is also working for Orkla, in Stabburet), reading books (now reading "Revolutions" by Nobel Prize winner J M Le Clézio, highly recommended!) the occasional visit to the gym... I also have a weakness for fashion magazines, sushi (and a lot of other good food) and red wine.

If you have any questions regarding Orkla, Elkem, some things I have written about or something completely else, feel free to make a comment below and I will answer it. Have a nice day and hope to see you here again!