Visiting our joint venture plant in north China

This week I visited our joint venture plant in Inner Mongolia, a province in north China. From Shanghai it took me 3 flight hours with two different planes and then another 2 hours by car to the small town where the plant is located. The town is called Qipanjing, but it is really more of an industrial park with houses for the employees than a city, even though there is a downtown part with some restaurants and karaoke bars. It is located in the middle of stony desert land, which was even drier than usual due to a horrible drought affecting north and west China earlier this year. Before the government decided to invest in an industrial park in the area, the main income source was kashmir-goats.

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 Erdos originally made its fortune in kashmir, but has diversified into coal power plants, chemicals, metals, etc.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! = )

Back in the office again

Back to work again after a great and relaxing vacation week in the middle of China, watching pandas (even cuter live than on Discovery channel ; ) and several old temples, of which one was still inhabitated by buddhist monks.

I have just a few weeks left here in Shanghai, so now it's time to get the final work done. Today I've completed a task about secondary (recycled) aluminium production, going through a lot of uncertain statistics and trying to sum it up for the Asian countries. I've also booked flight tickets for next week's visit to our joint venture plant Erdos in Inner Mongolia in distant, north China. I'm really looking forward to visiting such a remote, exotic place and to get the opportunity to compare a Chinese silicon plant to the Norwegian and Icelandic ones I've seen before - you will get an update from that in the end of next week!

Today I had lunch with an Orkla colleague who, together with a friend, are travelling around the world, dropping by Shanghai this week. I hope my sofa will prove more comfortable than the night train from Xian... = ) My colleague Anette was curious to get an update on the activities in Elkem and Orkla during the last few months, there have been a lot of organisational changes recently to adapt to the turbulent times. With all these guests coming and going it doesn't feel like I'm too far away from home...! Especially not when they bring what I miss the most (well, after family & friends of course) - breakfast items, candy & magazines from Europe...*happy sigh*

From pandas and temples, back to the office again.

Already April!

Time flies so fast, I can't believe it's already April!

Today I have been to a seminar held by the Swedish Chamber of Commerce about "leading organizations to higher performance in difficult times". Quite a title to live up to... but it was an interesting seminar, or at least the discussion that arised in the Q&A session about Swedish/Scandinavian business culture vs. Chinese and American business cultures. In Shanghai there is really an international mix of people at all these kinds of events!

This week it has been quite chaotic in the office, we have all changed desks since the office layout is changed to prepare for the other Orkla companies in Shanghai that are moving into our office within the next few weeks. At one time on Monday morning there were chairs, desks, computer screens and flowerpots standing around everywhere, but somehow we all managed to find our new places and get the normal office work running again. After Easter our colleagues at Borregaard and Lilleborg are moving in.

Otherwise I've continued working on my projects, no travelling these past few weeks. But next week I'm taking holidays to go to Chengdu in Sichuan province together with my boyfriend who will come visit me. Chengdu is famous mainly for two things; very spicy food and its panda breeding centre. Before leaving China it's a must to have seen a panda in the nature!

More customer visits and finally spring!

Last week I was in Seoul, visiting potential and existing customers together with a technical project manager from our Kristiansand office in Norway and our local distributor. The traffic queues were massive in and around Seoul, so we spent a lot of time in the car. However, several of the customers were interested in getting samples of the product after hearing the technical presentation of its characteristics and benefits, which was good to see. Especially now in these days when the business climate is harsh all over the world.






Picture of me with Bryan and Gerd, my Korean and German colleagues, taking a coffee break.







I also managed to get some time for sightseeing in some of the evenings with guidance from a colleague at the distributor and a friend's friend who turned out to live in Seoul. Seoul is really a bustling city with lots of neon lights, mega-department stores, tiny traditional mom-and-pop-shops, and lots of people and traffic everywhere. Even for me, coming directly from Shanghai, it was quite overwhelming!

Today I'm going with my Chinese colleague Ben for a visit at a potential customer here in Shanghai. After that I suppose the afternoon will be spent writing a visit report and arrange with the travel expenses from last week...

By the way, spring has finally come to Shanghai! I've been looking forward so much to the first warm days and now they're here!

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!