Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Starting 2008 in China

I kicked of the new year with a semi holiday, semi work vacation in China. Point 65 has a corporate apartment in downtown Shanghai where I stayed with my wife Camilla and our 3 kids, Felix 19, Axel 18 and Axeline 15. it's a great little apartment on the 25th floor of a new, nice building with stunning views over Shanghai. I can tell you that the new years eve fireworks were incredible to watch form above. Most intense fireworks were shot from the Bund and we had a perfect view of that with the fireworks reflecting from all the mirror -window high rices (sky scrapers) around us.As usual production related matters took up more time than I initially thought so our planned paddling excursion to the sunny beaches of Hainan island had to be scrapped.
A good thing though that my wife Camilla is envolved in the company, helping out with R&D, quality and other production related issues. Se we spent a lot of time together although wrestling with plugs, molds and production.
The kids also joined in on the fun, exploring the production facilities, lunching with the workers and helping out a little bit. But honestly, they mostly stayed in town shopping and hanging out. Shanghai is the place for it! Felix, is actually based in Shanghai where he studies Chinese, and helps out with primarily quality control.
So what were we so busy with? Well, a lot of different issues. Our vice president for R & D, Nigel Foster, wanted to make some changes on the Whisky 16 plug, moving some deck fitting recesses around and changing their shape. Camilla was working hard getting the changes done and a new master mold finished. Also the new Double-Shot, also designed by Nigel, needed her attention in deck adjustments to the plug.
We checked on the new building for the rotomolding factory, which will be bigger and better than the present one.
We are also hiring new people at a high rate. I'm responsible for finding an executive assistant to support our Chinese manager, Micheal Gu. We also need a couple of new plug makers and a cad cam engineer.

3 comments:

Paul said...

Congrats Richard with your new Blog Richard!

Good reading.

Don't show of to many of our little secrets though! We have got a lot cooking there.

Keep writing,

Paul

Peter said...

Good luck with your blog Richard!

Looking forward to hear about your adventures in the kayak business world....and more.

Cheers,

Peter
www.kajakevent.se

aliks said...

Cool Richard! Sounds like fun!