Day 10 was going to be our second full day in Shanghai, and it was a packed one because we had two company visits planned. The first visit was the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and the second was going to be Horiba which is an engineering and research and development firm.
After the typical hour to an hour and a half of bus travel that I have become accustomed to, we arrived at AmCham. I was pretty excited about this visit because it correlated with my major (finance). The office was in a sort of courtyard type deal, so they didn’t have their own building from what I gathered. When we got up to the office, we shuffled into a conference room and were greeted by Chris and Daniel. Daniel worked in the government relations committee and Chris worked with PNC Bank who I think also had an office in the same building. They gave a very informative presentation on China’s economy, plans for the future, and business climate. One slide I found to be interesting in particular was a chart showing the 10 or so highest GDPs per city. I think there were 4 or 5 Chinese cities on that list, so that just goes to chow how big a part China’s cities are in its economy. Another interesting thing mentioned was how China uses tax money from businesses to fund its infrastructure, and because of the high taxes, there is a fear that the businesses won’t be able to pay off liabilities in the future.
The Q&A for AmCham was probably the best Q&A session I’ve ever been present for! Chris and Daniel seemed to have a lot of chemistry presenting together, so they were able to bounce off each other whenever any questions were asked. They also encouraged questions that were off topic, so we got to ask basically anything, within reason obviously.
The visit to AmCham was definitely one of my favorites, and it’s up there with Huawei. The Horiba visit was a completely different animal. There were really no business topics being discussed while we were there. Horiba was probably a lot more exciting for the engineering students than it was for me. I still found the visit to be interesting, nonetheless. From what I gathered, Horiba has five divisions: automotive testing systems, process and environmental, medical, semiconductors, and science. Most of their business in Asia, Japan in particular, but they also do business in Europe, and the Americas.
We had a brief Q&A session when we first got there. I couldn’t really think of any questions to ask because I was too busy freezing my butt off in that room! After the Q&A, we split into two groups and got a tour of the facility. I didn’t really understand what anyone was doing throughout the whole tour, but it was cool to see regardless. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of a few things, probably because they were supposed to be confidential, which I thought was pretty funny. With the end of the tour, our day was done. I thanked our hosts and we all got back on the bus, ready for another hour long commute back to the hotel.
The rest of my day was a whole lot of fun, but there’s a different time and place for that story.