After an adventurous journey from Yiwu City to Shenzhen by night train, which included the celebration of Professor Rüttimann’s birthday, we hopped on the bus at 9:30 a.m. The bus drove us to the Futian Free Trade Zone in Shenzhen where we visited the first company of the day: Lenovo. Lenovo is a Chinese multinational computer technology company. It produces innovative PCs and mobile Internet devices. Lenovo is the world’s largest PC vendor and fourth largest smartphone company. They employee 46.000 people and operate in more than 60 countries. Cindy Liu (DT Quality Manager) and Michelle Zeng (MFG Program Manager) warmly welcomed us at the LIPC Plant. After a short presentation about “Who Lenovo is” and “How they perform”, we were guided through the manufactory. We could see the assembly lines where Lenovo produces notebooks and desktop computers. Before leaving the production site, everyone had to pass a security check, which is a standard procedure to ensure that nobody steals anything.
Due to time constraints we stopped at McDonalds to have lunch. After a couple of days in China, which included some unrecognizable meals, it felt good to eat something familiar.
The second visit of the day was at HEAD Sports (HUI Zhou) Corporation. Roland Wörgelbauer (QM Racquetsport) welcomed us with a wide selection of soft drinks, snacks and fruits. He introduced the production site. Notable is the fact that most of the 550 employees live on the premises and sleep in dormitories. The employees have to work six days a week in two shifts. The result of these numerous work hours is that HEAD is able to produce more than 100 million tennis balls a year. Before visiting the manufactory where HEAD produces tennis balls, Mr. Wörgelbauer presented a short video showing the process of fabricating a tennis ball.
During the tour, everyone was able to make its own tennis ball. We had to attach two pieces of sleaze to a glued ball. In addition to the self-made tennis ball everyone received a box of HEAD Pro Tennis Balls. Equipped with gifts we headed for the border of Hong Kong by bus. Short before the border we disembarked and crossed the border by foot. After entering Hong Kong we took the metro to get to the Hotel Evergreen, which is our last accommodation of this field trip.
It was a very intense day with interesting visits of two companies producing well-known consumer goods and a lot of travelling.