Into the East: Trip to Shenyang & Fushun 2 days

The Finnish Business Counsel organized a 2 day trip to Shenyang. The Ambassador and a small team (including me) went to visit new developing areas of Shenyang and it's neighbor city Fushun. Shenyang's GDP has grown about 54% since last year and the whole city if liturally full of new houses, facotries and other facilities being build. Was amazing to see so much development. But this city still has a long way to go to reach even close to Beijing or Shanghai. I saw a lot of horses and donkeys on the streets just outside the city which tells something about the development.

Shenyang's TV tower

New buildings everywhere

The first company we went to visit was Neusoft. It's a Chinese software company started by some university students. The NEU word comes from North East Universities (of China). The company has grown so much that they run own universities to which they get young talent to apply and later they recruit them. They have about 50.000 employees globally so it's a huge company. They have also developed some health monitoring machines specially made for Chinese rural villages. It's a machine that measures your health and then send the information to the nearest hospital (sometimes up to 1000km away) so that the villagers can monitor their health home and not go to the doctor if they have "small" problems. People in rural places live on a very short budget on about 1€/day so you cannot do much travel or pay doctors with that unless you use up all your savings. Neusoft has been doing a lot of co-operation together with Nokia and other smaller Finnish companies.

Directors of Neusoft

The also manufactures a car with super tuned sound system, but for what use?

The health moitoring device

The cafeteria in the executive building looked like something straight from Europe...

After the company visit the Shenyang Vice-Mayor took us out for lunch at a really posh place. I had the biggest lobster in my life here. And the rest of the food was also amazing!

LOBSTER!!!

We continued to the Mobile Phone Industry Park where they make SIM cards and other phone components. First they gave us a presentation about the mobile parks development and we also introduced ourself and our company. I was the only Finnish person who did my own presentation in Chinese :)

They had my chinese name a little wrong "Sai-ba-shi-tian / Nu mai lin

In the there were some really strong chemical smells in the factory and I had a headache the rest of the day just by staying in there for 20 minutes. Can't imagine how those people feel who work there 12 or 16 hours a day...Well, we need cheap phones :)

Making the glass screens for touch phones

Phone assembly line

SIM card machine

After the phone factory we went to a place where they make X-Ray testing machines. These machines make sure that the X-Ray machines are safe and good quality. It was a bit worrying that they had these radiation signs on the doors...

Fallout 4 - New Shenyang

The "testing area"

The traffic was horrible and it took us very long time to move from place to place. We probably sat in the buss 6 hours so half of the day. They were building a subway network so only half of the lanes were in use. But we had a police escort the whole time who was efficiently making way for us by using the sirens and honking to anybody who came in the way and driving against red lights...In the evening they took us to a massage place and I fell asleep very fast after a 16 hour long day.

Day 2 we drove 60 km north-east to a town called Fushun and went to visit Lapland Foods cheese factory. They gave us a company presentation about their cheese and after it we had a lot of wine and cheese. Was really tasty!!

Before going to the airport back we had a lunch at another amazing restaurant where they had all soft of dishes. I ate so much good food on this trip! The table was decorated with some "Heavy Metal" fgures. When we asked if they have heavy metal music in Fushun they didn't understand what we meant...