Honeywell studies CPC report to discover business opportunities
Senior executives of US-based Honeywell International Inc found ample business opportunities in the report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in October 2017.
“The more I studied the report, the more excited I am,” said William Yu, vice president and general manager at Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies (PMT) Asia Pacific. PMT is one of the four strategic business groups of Honeywell.
According to Yu, what is stressed in the report in terms of speeding up reform of the system to develop an ecological civilization and build a beautiful China tallies well with the company’s business, since more than half of the company’s products and technologies are related to environmental protection and energy efficiency.
“For example, many refrigerants on the Chinese market are not friendly to the environment. We have refrigerants that don’t pollute the environment, but they currently have limited adoption in the Chinese market. But I am confident that those products will find increasing demand in China in the near future as the environmental regulations are becoming tighter,” Yu said.
Yu also said that he was inspired by the report’s emphasis on promoting further integration of the internet, big data and artificial intelligence with the real economy, he told the Global Times earlier this month.
According to a statement Honeywell sent to the Global Times, China is transforming from a big manufacturing country to a manufacturing powerhouse.
“Strong government support as well as the ample market scale and demands are of great appeal to high-end manufacturing companies,” the statement noted.
Honeywell is also pushing the company into “a new digitalization era” in its own software and services, the company noted.
The company predicts that in the next five years, 60 percent of Honeywell’s revenue growth will be related to software business.
Yu told the Global Times that after the report was delivered at the Party congress, Honeywell sent copies of the report – both in English and Chinese – to the company’s management staff and invited them to study the report thoroughly.
“A couple of weeks ago, we also organized group discussions of the report,” Yu said, adding that he plans to invite another expert to explain contents in the report to Honeywell employees this month.
“As an overseas company that entered the Chinese market many years ago, we focus on medium-term and long-term development in China. The report also points out China’s long-term development direction, and that shows we care about the same thing,” he said.
He also stressed that unlike some companies that just studied the report as a matter of routine, Honeywell studied the report for the company’s development.
“The CPC report shows us China’s tomorrow, and we are looking for opportunities for future development,” he noted.
Lydia Lu, vice president of communications, Honeywell Asia High Growth Regions, said that the company has always had the tradition of studying important government documents in China, including the 13th FiveYear Plan (2016-20).
Honeywell generated $2.4 billion in revenue in China in 2016, up 8.6 percent year-on-year, and it expects to achieve double-digit growth in China in 2017, the company disclosed.