Dear All
After a warm welcome by Mr Hoawen Wu, Director of the International Programs, and the Dalian University of Technology, some first impressions of Dalian were collected by visiting the campus and the downtown area before retreating to our hotel and preparing for the first company visits.
With a group of students from the French Clermont-Ferrand University we visited the Dalian Locomotive & Roll-Stock Co. Ltd (DLoco) production plant in the northwest of the city. The company with over 8’000 employees spans over a vast space and consists of an impressively large array of buildings. One of the key impressions was the profound depth of the value chain from the company own iron-ore mine to the sale of the locomotives. DLoco cooperates with severalwestern companies such as Siemens and GE.
One of the guides proudly informed us that DLoco produced most of the heavy machinery it used in the factory, something that hardly exists in the western world these days. It was also interesting to get to know that roughly 30% of the workforce in the production line is female, which was astounding considering the hard manual labour demanded of the employees.
In the afternoon we returned to the campus of DUT and sat into a lecture Prof Rüttimann was holding in front of French and Chinese students. After his speech we received the chance to work in groups consisting of French, Chinese and Swiss students on the topic of “How business can change the world for a better.” Being able to exchange ideas and listen to the opinions of students from two continents
was interesting and will be kept in good memory by all participants. E-Mail addresses and cell phone numbers were exchanged in order to send the pictures taken during the afternoon.