By Elio Rasori and Christoph Gerber
After two exciting days of traveling, sightseeing and exploring Beijing, we were thrilled to finally visit the first two companies today. We started with two global and very well-known players, namely Lenovo and Swatch Group.
We began the journey at 8pm, after breakfast at the hotel lobby and boarded the bus driving us to our first stop at Lenovo. Due to heavy traffic, it took us about 1.5 hours to reach the campus. Once we arrived, a Lenovo official greeted our delegation and then introduced us to their latest products in their in-house experience center. During our visit we also had the chance to get hands-on with some of their products such as tablets and cellphones. It was inspiring to see how innovative and advanced Lenovo’s products are. From there, we moved on to the next floor of the building, where our guide provided us with some information about the companies history.
In a next step, we headed to the new Lenovo campus, which was about a 10 minutes drive away from their older campus. Due to the delay in the morning, we only had a short tour in the new campus and did not have the opportunity to look at the new production facilities. However, it was interesting to get an insight of their immense and very modern buildings. The tour ended at the Lenovo cantina where we could experience a fantastic lunch with many different varieties of Chinese dished and some of us tried Matcha ice cream for the first time in our lives.
From Lenovo we directly drove to Swatch Group where the second company visit was planned. Swatch Group operates a services center in Beijing which handles all the maintenance and reparations of their brands. The manager introduced us and presented some key figures and information about Swatch Group China. This was followed by a short explore through their workshop.
We ended the program at Swatch Group with a stopover at the nearby Rado boutique which is also the world biggest boutique of the brand with the highest sales revenue. All in all, it was an extremely exciting and educational day and we are very much looking forward to our upcoming company visits.
