Meet Some of the Local Talent
from
January/February 2006
by
Ann Morrison and Alejandro Reyes
Achievement-oriented, international, well connected—and Chinese.
That pretty much describes our list of potential directors, men and
women who could provide your board with unique, firsthand insights into
China. There is no guarantee that you can get them; most are busy
running huge operations that don’t have outsiders on their boards. But
a few do serve as directors of public companies. And more like them
will turn up in American boardrooms as Chinese enterprises reform on
the mainland and increasingly list on U.S. exchanges.
Zhang Yue, 45
Chairman and CEO, Broad Air Conditioning Co. Ltd.
From
a $30,000 investment in 1988, Zhang, a former public-school teacher,
and his brother Jian built an air-conditioner business that is the
market leader in China and exports to more than 30 countries. Broad Air
Conditioning is a pioneer—among other things, it has developed a unit
that runs on natural gas. And Zhang’s Hunan-based company was the first
in China to own a private jet. (He has a pilot’s license.) But his
business philosophy is based on ancient Chinese agrarian principles:
“Select your seed, sow at the right time, fertilize, and harvest.” Too
often, he says, entrepreneurs want to harvest first and work later. A
frequent speaker at international conferences, Zhang is an advocate of
energy conservation and good corporate governance.
Edward Tian Suning, 42
CEO, China Netcom International
Regarded
as one of China’s information-technology visionaries, Tian made a
fortune when the network-software company he co-founded, AsiaInfo, went
public on NASDAQ in 2000. By that time he had been recruited to run
Netcom, a Hong Kong-based company that is one of China’s largest
telecommunications operators. He’s still on the AsiaInfo board too.
Born and university-educated in China, Tian also holds a Ph.D. from
Texas Tech. So he has the right background for the delicate balancing
act that managing Netcom requires: The government owns most of the
shares, while the rest are traded on the New York and Hong Kong
exchanges. In his first year as CEO, he wasn’t even allowed on the
board—directorships were reserved for government ministers. Now
independent directors (none of them ministers) hold the majority of the
board seats.
Jack Ma Yun, 40
Founder and CEO, Alibaba.com
Too
young to have experienced the Cultural Revolution, Ma came of age just
as China was opening up in the 1980s. He made the most of it, first as
an English teacher, then as an entrepreneur. He started Alibaba.com in
1998 as a business auction site, and later introduced a separate
eBay-like site for consumer auctions. Known for self-confidence and
competitiveness, Ma triumphed in 2005 by selling 40% of his
still-private Hangzhou-based company to Yahoo for $1 billion. Yahoo, in
turn, put all its China operations under Alibaba. That gave Ma’s
company a market value of $4 billion, making it a mighty player in one
of the fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.
Zhou Zhongshu, 52
President, China Minmetals Corp.
Zhou
is one of the increasing number of state-enterprise chiefs with
international experience. A graduate of the Shanghai Institute of
Foreign Languages, he has lived in Brazil and Spain, where he served as
a commercial counselor at the Chinese embassy in Madrid. China
Minmetals, an investment and trading group focusing on metals,
minerals, and electrical products, is one of the country’s 44 key
government-owned enterprises. It is playing a major strategic role by
finding sources for the raw materials China needs to fuel its economic
growth. In the course of this mission, Zhou has traveled the world
making deals. In 2005 the company signed agreements for copper
production in Chile and a coal joint venture in North Korea. But
Beijing-based Minmetals failed in a $4.7 billion attempt to take over
Canada’s zinc and copper giant Noranda.
Yuan Ming, 60
Director, Institute of American Studies, and Vice Dean, School of International Studies, Peking University
Professor
Yuan is one of the best-known Chinese experts on U.S.-China relations.
She has lived in the U.S. several times, as a visiting scholar at such
places as the Brookings Institution in Washington and the University of
California at Berkeley. Politically well connected—her husband is a
senior government official—Yuan speaks candidly and in fluent English
about the U.S. and China and how both sides must work together to
ensure regional and global peace. She is critical of American
“lecturing” on such issues as human rights and Taiwan, but equally
critical of those in China who talk aggressively about taking military
action to assert Chinese sovereignty.
Jiang Jianqing, 52
Chairman and President, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
A
graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and of a
one-year advanced-studies program at Columbia University, Jiang is a
student of what he calls the “technical revolution” in the American
banking industry. He is aiming to introduce similar reforms and
advancements at ICBC, the largest of China’s Big Four state-owned
commercial banks. Ahead of an anticipated initial public offering in
2006, Jiang is selling small stakes in the bank to investors like
Goldman Sachs and American Express, which can help introduce the best
practices in fields from credit risk to corporate governance. He
insists that local banks will be able to weather the onslaught of
foreign competition when China’s banking sector opens to the rest of
the world in 2007. The key, he says, is to deal with nonperforming
loans and assets, streamline operations, and introduce technology
boosting productivity and competitiveness. Fast.
Mary Ma, 51
Senior Vice President and CFO, Lenovo Group
One
of the world’s most powerful women according to both Forbes and
Fortune, Ma was the central player in the negotiations that led to
Lenovo’s $1.75 billion purchase of IBM’s personal-computer business in
May. Lenovo is now the third-biggest PC maker in the world, behind Dell
and Hewlett-Packard. A graduate of Capital Normal University in
Beijing, Ma continued her studies at King’s College London and began
her career as an English translator at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
She is an independent director of Standard Chartered Bank and Sohu.com,
a Beijing-based Internet company traded on NASDAQ.
Laura Cha Shi Meilun, 55
Former No. 2, China Securities Regulatory Commission
Cha
shocked the Hong Kong financial community in 2001 when she quit her
position as vice chairman of the local securities and futures
commission and moved to Beijing to bring Hong Kong-style discipline to
China’s rowdy markets. As No. 2, or vice minister, at the China
Securities Regulatory Commission, she presided over the introduction of
a raft of regulations. Then, in 2004, Cha left the CSRC to go home.
Back in Hong Kong, she was appointed to the cabinet of the former
colony’s chief executive. Shanghai-born and U.S.-educated (the
University of Wisconsin and the University of Santa Clara law school),
Cha is a director of Johnson Electric Holdings, a Hong Kong electronics
company, and of Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp., the local
operation of global bank HSBC.
Li Yining, 75
Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University
Talk
about a man before his time. This Jiangsu-born economist started
advocating share ownership as a tool for economic growth in the
mid-1980s, when all Chinese business enterprises were state-owned.
Though his views were criticized then, they are now considered
mainstream, and Li is known as “Mr. Stock Market” in China and abroad.
Though he no longer runs the Guanghua School of Management, he still
teaches there. He’s also a member of the powerful standing committee of
the National People’s Congress, which exercises legislative power when
the NPC is not in session. A popular commentator on the economy, he
argues strongly for Chinese stock-market reform as the key to investor
confidence.
Chen Feng, 52
Chairman, China Hainan Airlines Co.
Recognized as one of China’s leading entrepreneurs, Chen heads fast-growing Hainan Airlines, the country’s fourth-largest carrier, with some 500 mainland routes as well as service to other parts of Asia—and Budapest. (Hungarian-born financier George Soros has a 14.8% stake in the airline.) At Hainan, Chen has introduced such innovations as onboard auctions and birthday celebrations. Now he plans to consolidate Hainan and several of its subsidiaries into a carrier called Grand China Air. A lively speaker and China-booster, Chen is a graduate of Lufthansa’s Air Traffic Management College and keeps a second home near Seattle.
