Case Scenario 1: Fear Not

question 18

Essay

Case Scenario 1: Fear Not.
Wim Vijkland was trained as an engineer in the Netherlands and, after college, worked several years in the Chinese operations of Philips Electronics and then Unilever. Between employers he returned home for several years to complete an MBA from Tiburg University in the southern Netherlands. His work gave him hands-on experience with overseas production, and rich sets of contacts in Mainland China and distribution channels in Europe and the United States. Wim has noted that many small and mid-sized European and U.S. manufacturers are interested in and would benefit from the low-cost Chinese production environment. Contrary to external stereotypes, he also believes that a Chinese factory can produce products that meet the most demanding technical and quality specifications met by manufacturers in more developed economies. At the same time, Vijkland understands that "foreigners" are generally reluctant to manufacture precision products in China for fear that the underlying proprietary technologies will be bootlegged and sold to competitors or outright copied. In an attempt to capitalize on this opportunity, Wim quit his job with Unilever and entered into a partnership with Sulin "Cathy" Liu, a local Beijing entrepreneur with whom Wim has worked extensively in the past. Cathy has a Ph.D. in physics from CalTech in California and an MBA from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. They have dubbed their partnership FearNot, and organized it as a limited liability corporation (LLC). Their plan is to set up duty-free manufacturing zones in which they develop mini-factories that operate under their ownership and production guidance, while at the same time creating a firewall between the clients' proprietary production processes and the open Chinese market. It is the partners' hope that this combination of intellectual property protection and low-cost overseas production will provide U.S. and European firms an incentive to enlist FearNot's services.
-(Refer to Case Scenario 1). What resources do Wim and Cathy bring to their venture?

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