A few days in China...

First, my apologies for the delay in this post.
The last couple of weeks have been absolutely fabulous and equally busy!!

Let me give you a quick re-run of events since my last post from Hong Kong.

After the advertising class on Sunday, we took the train to Guangzhou in the evening. I have to tell you friends, China is quite an experience!
The frantic pace of development is quite apparent wherever you look. When you see all the construction activities going on, it does actually sink in that this is the most rapidly growing economy in the world.

In Guangzhou, we visited the manufacturing facility of Burton Snowboard. The factory we visited manufactures snow boots for the Burton brand. Of course, it was great to learn about the design, manufacturing and the excellent quality controls, but the best part was to see the yet-to-be-launched boots of the ‘Shaun White’ range. (Sorry folks, no pics!)

The next pit-stop was Jabil – a Fortune 500 company that I hardly knew about before this trip.
Jabil is essentially a contract manufacturer for global electronics and technology companies.

The company itself is hugely impressive, which is to be expected given that they make products for companies ranging from HP to Nokia.
But what I found most interesting was that though most of us have probably used a product made by Jabil, we have never heard about the company itself. And apparently this decision by Jabil (to not market products under its own brand) has been an extremely profitable one.
Read this article on Jabil. Definitely interesting.

We also visited a furniture manufacturer - Lamex (recently acquired by HNI corp.) – and OnHing Paper. All these visits were so informative and educative (to say the least!) that I was taken by surprise!
And this was largely due to the interactive sessions with the management (both senior managers and line managers) at all these firms. Yes, I did expect value addition; but these discussions just blew my mind!