Returned from the 5 day trip to Chengdu in western China and have to say very impressed with my first visit.
The biggest impression I took from the country was the friendliness of the people and the genuine enthusiasm to do business and speak English.
Another impression was the huge contrasts. You see the new large BMWs and also the people in their rickshaws.
You have a five star hotel and in the street behind you have some run down houses.
Eating out was an experience. 3 of us got a taxi into the middle of Chengdu. Over a few hours we found no-one that could speak English or didn’t even see another foreigner. We had a great experience in a restaurant. For 7 euro each we got a set meal and drinks. We counted the number of plates of food brought out and it came to 55 !
Of course the Irish group would find the Irish bar, 1,500 miles from Beijing – the Shamrock ! They had a signed Kilkenny jersey. I asked the Chinese girl behind the counter and she said she though it was from a team called Manchester !
Shopping has the local bargain shops & markets where you should bargain but also the Nike, Adidas & Armani shops.
It wasn’t all work. We got to visit the world famous Chengdu Panda Breeding & Research Centre.
11 companies travelled, mostly first time visits to China. The companies covered Software, Travel, Engineering & business development. Most of them were going to see what opportunities there were for business development in China.
The trip was co-ordinated by Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Enterprise Board.
Before the vist, the Enterprise Board organised a number of talks to be given by Deirdre Walsh of China Green. I found these talks to be very informative & helpful. Deirdre gave very good background and suggestions for visiting China and attending meetings in China.
We met with the minister for Trade, Mr. Billy Kelleher, one of the heads of Enterprise Ireland in Asia and the Irish ambassador to China. Having such a delegation gave a very good impression to companies that we were meeting.
Here I am presenting Minister Billy Kelleher (from Cork) with a replica Kilkenny hurl and the history of hurling in English & Chinese. These gifts went down much better with the Chinese companies I gave them to than they did with the Cork minister !
The Business Matching.
The main point of the trip was a business matching event between EU & Chinese companies. There were companies there from all 27 EU countries. Altogether 400 Chinese companies & 200 EU companies. We were able to pick out companies that might have a good fit with our own companies. I had meetings with 10 companies and am following up with 3 or 4 of them.
The opening ceremony for the event. Just to show the sheer scale of business activity, we were attending this business conference but within 10 minutes walk there were two other equally big international conferences taking place in Chengdu.
Some of the business people we met had good English but we were each assigned an interpreter. I had just a few words of Chinese but even that helped.
There were huge differences in scale of the companies I met, from small start ups to a company with €50 million turnover and 700 employees. The fact that such companies would attend such an event shows the merit they place on partnering and doing business with companies from the west.
After one interview I was asked to do an interview on CCTV, the Chinese main television station. The interview lasted around 5 minutes. I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube yet !
Yours truly, taking the podium !
The intention would be to partner with a Chinese company to sell our software into the Chinese market.
Will update the blog with progress on this.
