Today brought two more company visits: with Kotoni, a shoe manufacturer, and Bristol Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical giant. We had to arise early in order to check out and be on the road with enough time to get to Kotoni. It turned out that it was mostly unnecessary to leave that early (we arrived an hour early) but you never know with Shanghai traffic. The shoe manufacturing facility was very interesting. They do much of the work by hand, aided in part by machines. We met with Ernie, an Italian shoemaker/designer and with the son of the company owner, Chris Liao. Kotoni makes shoes for a variety of companies and lines, including Dockers, some other cheaper brands as well as some like Kenneth Cole and other lines priced at $300+. For the most part, the shoes are made via assembly line with hand stitching and assembly. Machines were used only for jobs like pressing the bottom of the shoe on, and for material cutting. Another old Italian shoe designer showed us around the factory. Both of the Italians had previously made their own lines of shoes in Italy, and the older one had even owned his own factory. They knew quite a bit about shoes. Actually, whenever we walked past, everyone would be looking at our shoes; they are definitely shoe people there. My Dockers say 'Made in China' so it's possible that they were made at the plant we visited today. My shoes aren't made of 100% nice leather with a leather insole, which is what they specialize with here, so mine might have been made elsewhere.
Bristol Myers Squibb provided us with food in their worker's cafeteria. They were very good to us and had a nice conference room setting. I had been looking forward to BMS for pretty much the entire trip because it relates so closely to Chemical Engineering. Unfortunately the place we visited was a packaging facility that didn't actually make the drugs or have a local R&D lab. We met with a Hong Li, a non-scientist. It was interesting to hear about the business aspects of the pharmaceutical industry in China, and BMS's role, however I left a bit disappointed. I asked a couple of questions about the process, "How many chemical reactions does a typical drug go through before it's finished?" and "What suppliers do you get your raw materials from?" He really couldn't answer either of them for me. I realize that he was not involved in either the development or the process, but I still wasn't satisfied by his general supply chain answer. He couldn't even give me an order of magnitude (1, 10, 100…) for the number of reactions a typical drug goes through. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the visit, but in general, most of the places we've been to have been much on the business side in presentation content. Business is very intricately tied to engineering, so I'm definitely still able to learn a lot. Probably a lot more than I expected to about business, which has been good.
We caught our train at 6:20pm after the meeting. We were plenty on-time this time, which was good. It was only two hours long and the time went quickly. In Nanjing we left the airport and saw a musical fountain and hotel mounted laser system. Nanjing is much smaller than both Shanghai and Beijing. The district that our hotel is in is older with smaller shops and less of a night life. Our room looks over a river though, which is quite beautiful. We took a walk this evening and saw some shops. There are quite a few along the waterfront and we had a good time taking pictures and that sort of thing.
It was a long day, so I'm going to get some sleep now. Tomorrow we visit Sun Yat Sen's tomb and have some self-directed time. Night, night.
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