In the person of Wilson Wang, Baerlocher China has a Managing Director who sees himself as a bridge builder and puts the customer above all else. A site with a lot of creative team-building measures and likeable idiosyncrasies in a challenging market. Meet the "Bear Brand".
China
Placing the customer at the top
As the world's largest market, China has its attractions, but also its specific challenges for investors. In this setting, it is good to be able to rely on a navigator who builds bridges. Not only in the market, but also within the group. With Wilson Wang, Baerlocher China has an experienced Managing Director at the helm who sees himself as the connecting link between sometimes very different worlds: "Oriental culture is so different from Western culture. I try to build a bridge and facilitate communication between different cultures. And I also encourage my team not to be afraid and to get in touch with the guys from other parts of the world." To this end, Wilson fearlessly pursues new, perhaps even idiosyncratic paths, but above all he sets a good example. He himself only practiced Spoken English, which is Baerlocher's group language, at the age of 30. Wilson Wang motivates his team to also follow suit. For instance, he sometimes reads out the news in English and shares the audio with his colleagues. Wilson Wang supports his team dedicating half an hour a day to language learning. "English is not easy for Chinese people. It is often a “mute” language. We can read and write it but find it difficult to pronounce. Still, English is so important for us. We want to be no different from our other sister companies."
Via Malaysia to China
Baerlocher China is characterized by a number of special features. Together with Baerlocher Kimya, the plant is one of Baerlocher's most recent foreign start-ups. Production at the plant in Changzhou started in 2012. The Bear’s journey to China began as early as the 1980s. But in the beginning, business relations did not last long. So, China had to wait a little longer for Baerlocher.
Why? In order to get established in the Asian market in the long term, it is necessary to have production facilities locally, which Dr. Michael Rosenthal started to push for at the beginning of the 1990s. The choice fell on Malaysia. Because while travelling in Southeast Asia was relatively easy at the time, market access to China, which was then in a phase of economic upheaval, still posed a greater challenge. In the end, the key to success was named Malpaso Cheng. The bright Chinese initially had been working in Australia for Degussa, which was a shareholder in Baerlocher until 1986. During joint trips to China with Rainer Grasmück, he succeeded in getting his foot in the door through tests and the first successful sales. Later Malpaso Cheng became Managing Director of Baerlocher Malaysia, in charge of business development in the entire Asia-Pacific region. From Malaysia, Baerlocher opened up the surrounding markets.
„The Bear Brand“
Malpaso’s success in Malaysia eventually paved the way to China. In 2007, a sales office, Baerlocher Trading Co., Ltd. was established in Shanghai. Three years later and 200 km away from Shanghai, Baerlocher China was founded in Changzhou. Changzhou is an industry location in the east of China with more than five million inhabitants. In October 2012, the inauguration ceremony took place, accompanied by a lion dance promising luck and success, elements of Sichuan opera and the sound of traditional Chinese instrumental music. For Michael Rosenthal, by this time already chairman of the advisory board, the opening was a belated success. Baerlocher China’s legal form is typical for China: it operates as a WOFE, a wholly owned foreign enterprise. This means that the company is allowed to trade independently in China, i.e. without a Chinese partner. Today, around 90 employees produce three times as much as in 2015. Numerous awards from the local Chinese economic zone confirm its success. Wilson Wang himself has also been honored several times for his entrepreneurial achievements. This is in no small measure due the “Bear Brand’s” all-out customer focus. "Bear Brand", with an own logo and design, is the name used in China because "Baerlocher" cannot be translated 1:1 into Chinese.
Our credo is: "We don't work according to the clock but to the customer's requirements," says Wilson Wang. This commitment is also evident in the organizational chart, which is dominated by the customer and where all employees with customer contact are placed on the top level. Wilson Wang himself and the management team are at the bottom of this structure, he says. That's why he requires his team to regularly take trips to customers, where employees from different departments and fields of activity come together and get to know each other: "We called it learning by travelling and built a very good team spirit. A team spirit from which the entire group benefits.”
