Our day started at 08.00 o’clock in the morning, when we met us in the lobby of our hotel. A bus drived us to the IBM company, where we firstly heard the speak of the General Manager Marcel Greutmann. He gave us an interesting introduction about the history of China, followed by a brief overview about the market place of IBM and some of its operations and finally its talents including the recruitment programm.
The second speaker is called Frank Zhang, he is the China GDC Banking Sector Delivery Leader. His topic was the China market and the IT industry. While his presentation we learned that during the past 30 years, China has been going through transformation from a closed state-planned economy to a more open and market driven economy. However, the state is still the principal actor and arbiter in the economy (for example there are a lot of monomoplies). To sum up, never the less the China IT industry has enjoyed rapid growth during the past 5 years.
After that Katherine Cheung – positioned as the Workforce Leader – gave us very interesting informations about the topic of IBM’s human relations. She said that because of the fact, that the economy is doing quite well in China, this would create new opportunities for new talents.
After the handover of the gifts the whole group was running out of time to catch the meeting with Schwarzkopf. So we took the lunch from KFC, get quikly into the bus which drove us to a modern german-style building, which was the seat of Henkel (for better understanding, Schwarzkopf is a brand of the firm Henkel). Michelle, Andi and Marc welcomed us and offered us some coffee, tee and cookies. During their presenation we got the main informations, that the global headquarter of that company is located in Hamburg(er) and Shanghai. The brand is knowing as a international, premium and elegant one, so fort hat reason the middle class households can be characterized as the target customers. In addition, they showed us some interesting videos about the history of Schwazkopf, the profession as a hair stylist and furthermore that the company organize hair dressing awards ech year, to support hair stylists.
At the end of the day, each one of us could join the fully programm (including wash, cut, massage and styling) in a local hair dressing studio.