TWO IMPRESSIVE VISITS – SUZHOU INDUSTRIAL PARK AND WORLD EXPO 2010

After staying overnight in a luxury hotel in Suzhou, we were heading to the industrial park which is located in the same city. Currently, half a million people are living in this industrial zone. Most of them are employees of one of the 3200 companies which have their facilities there.

The Suzhou Industrial Park is divided into clusters such as biotech or software technology to ensure a knowledge transfer between those companies. To improve the standard of living, the industrial park has several recreation areas, three huge lakes, two golf courts, movie theatres and several other leisure facilities.

The short history of the Suzhou Industrial Park is quiet amazing. Opened 15 years ago as a joint venture with the State Singapore Investment Fund, it is nowadays Asia’s most modern development zones. It hosts subsidiaries of 77 of fortune

500 enterprises. In a few years, the industrial park will have 1.5 million people working, living or studying there, as Mrs. Lisa Chen from the Investment Promotion Bureau mentioned in her speech. All the students were very impressed about the dynamic and speed of the development.

In the afternoon, we had the chance to visit the facilities of the World Exposition 2010 in Shanghai. Mr. August Keller from Nüssli gave us an interesting insight into the ongoing construction work on the exposition area. The Swiss company, which is well known for its temporary infrastructure buildings for events, builds besides the Swiss Pavilion also those of Germany and France. Nüssli has only five employees at the construction site, the workers are all hired locally. This setup of sending only a few Swiss engineers to Shanghai is cost saving, but it is also a challenge for them to communicate effectively with the local workers.