Visiting Novozymes’s Chinese Headquarters
Day Three—April 8: Eating breakfast on this—another grey (grey because of smog, not because the sun isn’t shining)—day, I was amazed by the fact that the Chinese seem to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Rice with eggs, chicken, dumplings with mixed meat, water melons, etc. Then, so am I on this trip :-).
This was the day where we were going to visit the Chinese headquarters of Novozymes, the company around which the cases evolves. Below, a photograph of their building.
Novozymes’s Finance Director for Asia gave us a more detailed presentation on their activities in Asia, as well as surprising and knowledgeable insights during Q&A. Novozymes produces enzymes and micro-organisms (if I get the time, I’ll write more on the company later) and relies heavily on patent protection of these products in order to stay profitable. To my surprise, in China, intellectual property rights issues are of no concern to Novozymes—their products and the processes to make these are simply too complicated to become victim of the normal Chinese culture of copying things ruthlessly.
We were also introduced to NNE (my unofficial explanation to this abbreviation is Novo Nordisk Engineering), which—like Novozymes—also originates from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. NNE is an engineering consultancy and has managed the construction projects of both Novozymes’s headquarters and their production site in TEDA (an economic development zone a couple of hours north of Beijing by car). In the case we’re solving, the issue is an expansion of Novozymes’s production capacity, which is why the viewpoint of NNE is extremely relevant. Below is a picture of Novozymes’s Asian Finance Director, Mads, and NNE’s General Manager for China, Christian.
After having spent the day at Novozymes, including an hour or two of case solving, we headed back to the hotel. I headed out to Beijing’s pedestrian street with a bunch of people to have a look—it is actually a pretty normal pedestrian street with McDonald’s, Nike, Häagen-Dazs, adidas, and what else you could imagine. Evidently, there are also stores carrying Chinese-made products, for instance, a store carrying all kinds of “cutlery”, i.e., chop sticks (photograph below).
This was also the day where I bought an incredibly expensive ice cream from Häagen-Dazs (RMB 60, just below EUR 10, which is about the same as three good evening meals would cost you here) and some of my friends ate beetles, so we covered a lot of ground.
