Emerging Markets and Developed Markets are standard concepts in business schools. To visit one country from two economic stages of development, is the privilege, the students of this year’s SML-fieldtrip have. Combining in a single trip two different countries offers a high educational value.

Japan will be the first stop of the Asian trip. This country has a long standing friendship with Switzerland. This year marks the 150^th Year of the diplomatic relationship between Japan and Switzerland, an event to honor, to celebrate and a good occasion to visit this land of the rising sun.

 Our second stop is China, a country which also has a longstanding relationship with Switzerland. In the year 2010, we celebrated 60 year of diplomatic relations between the two countries and since this year, a Free Trade Agreement has been reached.

These two Asian countries will allow our students to emerge first into the rich cultural heritage of Japan and to experience its way of doing business. Afterwards, China, the economic powerhouse build also on its rich historical heritage will be the next highlight. Comparing these two countries will allow to draw interesting parallels as well as to recognize distinctive differences.

This year’s trip follows again the academic mission of the School of Management and Law – “Building Competence. Crossing Boarders.” The overarching goal of this class is to understand, what economic needs 1’500’000’000 people have and how companies, local and foreign, serve them!

Furthermore, the students will explore live Cross Cultural Management while they emerge deeply into global business activities! Along these lines, the overarching goal is to prepare the SML-students even better for the challenges Western companies face and to become truly global minded future business leaders.

All this is made possible through the companies we can visit, the personal support of our Dean A. Haelg and Prof. F. Angst and C. Bamert, M. Morger, R. Nerz, T. Oehler and J. Paravicini of the student organization team.

For the participants, it is my wish that all aspects of the trip will be a part of their positive educational experience at the SML: May the trip enables them even further to enhance their horizon of success!

Asia, here we come again in 2014 . . . .

Prof. Dr. R Rüttimann

School of Management & Law / Zurich University of Applied Sciences

After 17 days of packed program, the final day has arrived. We met a little before 9a.m. to head out for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before the class caught the train to the campus, Professor Rüttimann informed us about the importance and challenge at the same time to build partnerships with other universities all over the globe. Especially in a more and more international perspective of studying, keeping up a good reputation by seeking contact to other institutions of knowledge is crucial. It is a long way down the road to establish these kinds of connections but on a long term perspective a rewarding effort for the school, as well for the students. Continue reading →

Just before departing for some final miles on the road of the People´s Republic of China, a bakery just around the corner of our hotel was discovered. While loading the bus, everybody got their supply of breakfast and coffee and on time, we headed out strengthened to pick up Professor Rüttimann and prepare for the next company visit.

On the way to Lenovo, Professor Rüttimann informed the class about the circumstances of the visit. We were made aware of the fact, that Lenovo will not let us into the factory due to the rising competition with the kind of products manufactured in the computer-branch. Esspecially in an industry like the computer industry, products experience a very short life-cycle and therefore information has to be kept as much inside the company as possible. Continue reading →

Today we travelled several hours by bus to get from Guangzhou (Canton) to Shenzhen on the road we made stops in both, Heshan (Green Mountain) and Dongguan.

Approx. Routing – calculated from maps.google.com

We met at 7.20 am to get on the bus at 7.45, and then we proceeded to Heshan, where we visited a Swiss Company called FRANKE.

produces kitchen supplies, industrial coffee machines, bathroom utilities and fast-food kitchen, mainly for McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Our visit focused on the ladder products, after a brief introduction from mr. Gao, senior regional operations director, we saw the production line. It was built as every manufacturing process textbook would suggest (see our figure). The Japanese 5-S (seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke in English sorting, set in order, systematic cleaning, standardising, and sustaining) was present; every team had a board where the actual state of accomplishment was shown.

                                Production site – lean-management

Graphic Display of the Production – no detours

Afterwards, two other members of the board, Ms. Wong – Regional Sales Director Asia – and Mr. White – Regional Project Execution Director joined for an exercise, in which the student-groups answered certain business case questions. These answers were checked by the three directors. During lunchtime we could continue the discussion.

After visiting FRANKE we left Dongguan to visit the South China Mall, the largest shopping centre in the World, total constructing cost reached about CHF 500 million.  However, as the shopping centre was a) too big b) badly accessible (no highway, subway or train station) and c) built in a rather poor area no one rented out shops. This impressingly showed that building without prior market research can have disastrous consequences. 99% of the shopping space is vacant since its opening or using other words: 43 Shops out of 2.300 possible ones are busy.

             “New South China Mall” – cover for a construction site demolishing parts of the Mall

Subsequently we boarded the bus again and after a convenient two-hour bus ride we arrived in Shenzhen. Prior to this we were given some facts about Shenzhen, like  its policy of being a modern and sustainable city that had an amazing growth from a small town to one of the major cities in the World due to the opening reform of chairman Deng. However, our hotel could somehow withstand this governmental policy of being modern and sustainable, it has that charming ten-years-ago “made in China”-atmosphere and is well suitable for field trip students with a major in zoology.

Written by the following members of group 4:

Florian Maier & Lukas Bühler

This morning we arrived at the train station of Guangzhou, we spent the all night on the train. Some were lucky and got soft sleeper class, whereas others had to be satisfied with the hard sleeper class. Nevertheless we had to be splitted, we all really appreciated this journey.

Jack, our tour guide, picked us up and lead the group to the Guang Yong Lido Hotel. Unfortunately, our organisation team had to sort out certain problems during check in, but finally everything has been solved on time. Then we had the chance to fresh up and rush for breakfast.

At noon the group shortly met up, afterwards we transfered to SGS by bus. It is the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. The service has been developed in the last couple of years to a wide range of sectors and industries. SGS helps its customer reaching the required quality in many business areas. We were allowed to visit the inspection and testing laboratories. A very fascinating part of the tour has been the testing procedures for high quality soccer balls.

After the informative and interesting visit at SGS, we departed for the Sun Yat-Sen University. There we met Prof. Dr. Christian Staehlin who is Professor of Molecular Biology and Principle Investigator at the School of Life Sciences since 2005. Christian Staehelin is heading a research team interested in the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis. After a short introduction of his work and research, some of his students showed us their laboratories, work places and the botanical garden, which is located on the roof of the research building.

Heading to a typically chinese restaurant with our new friends, we enjoyed an interesting evening full of enrichments. The dinner gave us further possibilities to talk about the daily life and sum up this instructive day.

Today we started our day with a short introduction and a Chinese crash course by our new guide Mrs Wong (English name: Phoebe). She sang us a song about a girl, which represents the Yan-Minority. The interesting thing about this story is, that 80% of the women wear their hair about one meter and they only cut it ones in their lifetime at the age of 18. She also informed us that Guilin has over 33 Mio visitors per year although Guilin has only 5 Mio habitants. 20’000 of these habitants are tour guides for tourists. Imagine that – 0.4% of the habitants are working as tour guides for the tourists.

After this interesting presentation we arrived at a Tea-Plantation. After a few photos of the Tea Plantage itself, we had the chance to experience a traditional tea preparation and we also had the possibility to taste four different flavours of tea. To finally round up this tea experience we went to the showroom where we could buy all the teas we tried and also all other flavours they are offering.

At 6 pm it was time to board the train to Guangzhou. Because of the shortage of space our group was separated into two groups. One had soft beds and the other one hard beds for sleeping. It was very interesting to see the different standards and how the differented classes are treated. Anyway, before going to bed we had a great time together in the train.

Written by Stefan Ackeret, Sarah Ehrensperger, Dominic Hasler, Melani Zadro

After a two hours power nap we met again at the hotel lobby at 8.10 am. We left Guilin with the bus to get our boat at the Guilin Harbor to Yangshuo. The boat ride was full of amazing and fascinating landscape impressions. Continue reading →

A new day in shanghai before we leave to our next destination. Our group met at 7.40 am in the lobby and headed towards the subway station to transfer to the company Geberit. Geberit is a manufacturer for sanitary technology with global presence and was founded in 1874 in Switzerland. The CEO of Asia Pacific and the head of Product in Asia Pacific welcomed us to the factory and briefly introduced us to challanges in the local market. Their main goal is to increase market share by steadily improvements. Learning by doing is geberit’s approach to make the chinese market more profitable.

Continue reading →

This morning Prof. Dr. Rüttimann surprised us with a visit to the cashmere production company – Artwell.

Artwell is one of the biggest suppliers of cashmere products for companies like Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Globus and Grieder. After a warmly welcome by the CEO of Artwell, Mr. Alfred Lee, followed an introduction about the company which is located in the Zhejiang Province. Moreover, they gave us the great opportunity to see the whole production line. Now we understand the processes from dyeing, carding, spinning to the sweater workshop. Those processes showed us how they turned wool from the cashmere goats which are living in the Inner Mongolia to real cashmere pullovers, pillows, scarves and so on. We learned that for one pullover four goats are needed and that they are sheared in April and May. The animal feels no pain in this process. It was impressive to see that every step is supported by machinery. We had the chance to feel the material after every step. Depending on the process stage the wool was softer and thinner or thicker.

This company was a good example for a successful vertical integration of a production, which means, that they are flexible in their processes. Moreover, Artwell is able to control every step and therefore to provide a high quality product.

The second surprise after lunch was a tour through the Venice of the east – Wuzhen. Similar to the original Italian city, some houses of Wuzhen are only accessible by boats or gondolas. The town is 2km long and has 12’000 permanent residents and it is located next to the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. The town has not only lovely sceneris, but also a great history, which was important for China’s history too.

There we visited the footbinding museum, which displays 825 pairs of footbinding shoes from various places of China as well as many pictures and footbinding tools with detailed explanations. People today cannot imagine that, hundreds of years ago, the Chinese women believed that the most beautiful thing for a woman were the smallest feet instead of a beautiful face or a well filled-out figure.

At the evening everybody had time to enjoy the impressive city Shanghai.

Ackeret, Ehrensperger, Hasler, Zadro