Today we left the hotel bright and early at 8am to go visit SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation). We just had a brief talk from an American living here working with the company and another guy working at the company who is a 2007 UVa alum joined us for Q&A about life in Shanghai as an American. We went to see his house because he lives in the company living quarters. It was really interesting to see the company has built up a little town that looks just like any suburb right next to their huge factory. If you really wanted to you could live entirely in that town and never leave; it has a school, grocery stores, pharmacy, dentist, restaurants, etc. This guy has a 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom townhouse in the compound for his family of 4 and pays rent of $800 a month because he works for the company. We went to lunch at a restaurant in the company town that was like the typical restaurants we have been going to with lots of dishes to pick at and try everything. Then we took the bus back to the hotel and had a little break before our next visit of the day.
Our next visit was to Darwin Marketing where we met with the Founder/CEO. The company is an internet marketing company and does the paid search marketing things that RKG does plus more. It is definitely a little bigger than RKG but he works with the Chinese search engines and does even more internet marketing consulting beyond paid search. It was really cool to hear his opinions on everything since it is the field I am going into. He was an American who got his MBA from Darden and then just decided to move to China and start his own company so he had a really cool entrepreneurship story to go along with the marketing content.
After that visit we were dropped off by the bus at the restaurant for our evening reception but we were about 30 minutes early so we were free to walk around and get dinner. We stopped in a little café place and split some pizzas – it was definitely nice to have some non-Chinese food that wasn’t McDonald’s or BK. Our reception was with the UVa Club of Shanghai so there were a decent number of young-ish alums who are living in Shanghai so it was fun to hear all their stories, etc. A lot of them are in fields other than business so it was interesting to have a little variety. After the reception the bus took us back to the hotel and I went right to bed after such a long day. The sleep is much needed since there is another long day lined up for tomorrow.
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