Greetings all! We are the new staff of CITO who have arrived in Taiwan and we are preparing for our upcoming year. We would like to say that we are very excited to be here and have big plans for this semester with events and other fun activities! The first event is our opening ceremony that will be held in the beginning of October.
On Thursday 2nd of April CITO representatives Kasper Westman and Victor Petersson met with Johan Hallenborg, a Swedish diplomat working at the Embassy Section Office in Yangon as a Minister Counsellor. The Section Office was inaugurated in June 2014 and works mainly with development cooperation and political reporting. The Section Office also works with trade promotion. It is located in the Nordic House together with the Norwegian E mbassy, the Danish Embassy and the Diplomatic Mission of Finland. Johan Hallenborg has been working at the Embassy Section Office since 2014 and has during this time learned about the country and its political situation.
In the beginning of April CITO-members Kasper and Victor met Andreas Sigurdsson, entrepreneur, now running his own business in Yangon, Myanmar. According to him, he is one of approximately 50-100 startups in Yangon right now. Andreas was a member of the staff at the CITO office 2003/2004. Having finished his degree from Chalmers in 2005 he travelled to Shanghai on a language study grant by the Swedish Institute and learnt Chinese during 6 months. After that he stayed in Shanghai for 6 years to work for different companies. Andreas declares that China was a good school for learning how to make business in Myanmar and one of the choices for setting up a business in Yangon.
On Tuesday 31st of March CITO representatives Kasper Westman and Victor Petersson visited Ericsson’s office in Yangon, Myanmar. There they met with Nu Yin Myint and Nga Kim. Nu Yin Myint, working as a Communications Manager, was one of the first local employees at the office when she started working for Ericsson in 2012, changing careers from the hotel business. Wanting to work for a global company was one of the reasons for choosing Ericsson. Nga Kim is the Project manager for Ericsson’s project Connect To Learn. After working for Ericsson in Vietnam since 2010, she got the opportunity to takeon this challenge at the office in Yangon.The fact that Ericsson is a highly innovative company with a changing environment all the time makes her want to work for Ericsson. She says it is a challenging work, yet exciting.
On the 12th of May, we are having an event combining 25th Asia Magazine release and playing some traditional Swedish games called “Brännboll”, which has some resemblance with baseball . The location is in front of Assembly Building at 4 PM, hope to see you all there! The electronic magazine can already be found at: http://www.asia.chalmers.se/asia-magazine/
Kasper Westman, Linn Hantoft, Maximilian Ludvigsson, Alexander Radenkovic, Ludvig Barrehag, Johan Rydberg and Johnny Ngu was among the lucky few from the CITO office who go the opportunity to visit Ericsson in their office located in Taipei. During this meeting we met with many senior staff such as the President of Ericsson Taiwan Håkan Cervell, CTO Ralph Löfdahl, HR Manager Grace Chang, Communication Manager Joyce Lin and Account Manager Johnson Chen. This meeting was conducted to learn more about the difficulties and challenges of Ericsson in Asia in general, and Taiwan in particular. What they think needs to be done to satisfy the customers, and further also develop as a company. Ericsson is a provider of communications technology, such as provide the software, hardware and services to telecom operators, networking equipment, television solutions and the accompanying support that their solutions requires. As one of the largest companies in the field, Ericsson is leading the development of what they call: “The Networked Society”. The Ericsson branch in Taiwan specializes in IOT (interoperability tests), that is, to make sure customer devices and applications function well in live network environments. This is made to ensure the customer that the equipment is of the highest standard. During our meeting numerous topics were discussed, the most interesting one being their vision of the future and how the company will develop accordingly. The development of the internet has been incredibly fast, the amount of connected devices have been and will be increasing exponentially. The challenges lie in providing a network that can withstand the increasingly demanding customer (in terms of speed and stability), but also the increasing numbers of connected devices. From five billion to fifty. During the past years we have seen 1G, 2G, 3G and 4G have been developed. Where each new generation was developed to […]
On Friday 6th of March CITO representatives Linn Hantoft and Tommy Engqvist met up with Pontus Dahlenborg and Lennart Lundberg, exchange students at Seoul National University. Pontus and Lennart came to Seoul in September 2014 and will study there for a whole academic year, until the summer of 2015.
ASSA ABLOY is the world’s largest supplier of locks and security solutions. The company was formed in 1994 by a merge of the Swedish company ASSA with the Finnish company Abloy, and has today over 43 000 employees. We met with former Chalmers student, and CITO member, Emma Grönlund in Hong Kong in November. Emma studied Industrial Engineering and Management at Chalmers, and holds a Master Degree within Supply Chain Management. During her exchange year in Taiwan she got in contact with ASSA ABLOY that later offered her a chance to write her Master Thesis for them in Australia. After she finished her Master Degree she started working for the company’s APAC Division in Hong Kong. She has now worked within the APAC Operations team for 16 months, and covers sustainability and indirect spend management. Her work tasks include visiting their manufacturing sites, located in China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, where she for example organizes workshops or training with the local teams.
On Tuesday 10th of March CITO representatives Linn Hantoft and Tommy Engqvist visited Business Sweden’s office in Seoul in South Korea. They encountered Axel Brangenfeldt and Sookyoung Lim who both work as consultants at the South Korean office. Business Sweden is a merger between Exportrådet and Invest Sweden in 2013 and assist Swedish companies to grow internationally as well as attracting strategic investments to Sweden. The Swedish Government and Swedish businesses jointly own them. Because of the merger and the joint ownership they do have a great knowledge about South Korea and also a large contact network. Business Sweden has about 50 offices worldwide and in East Asia they have offices in for example Taiwan, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. In many offices there are a lot of Swedish employees but in Asia overall there is not that many since there is a big language barrier and cultural differences in all of these countries. In the Seoul office there are three Swedish employees out of about 10 people.
On Monday 9th of March CITO representatives Linn Hantoft and Tommy Engqvist visited Höganäs in Seoul, South Korea. They met Frank Song who is the Country Manager of South Korea. Frank has worked for Höganäs for 18 years and started there because he was tempted to work with sales for a foreign company. Höganäs was a good choice because he had a background in Material Science. The company’s major product is iron metal powder, which is used in a wide range of products instead of steel to reduce cost. The metal powder is pressed into a specific shape and then heated up in order to harden. It is commonly used for devices in engines in the automobile industry and for fast welding speed in the shipbuilding industry which both are important industries in South Korea.
