DIRK THOMAS came to Shenzhen two years ago as vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), one of the world's leading hard disk drive suppliers.

The amiable 50-year-old Californian says he feels fortunate to be in Shenzhen, where he has been seeing great changes and making a lot of new friends. The company's greater China operation is profitable despite the fierce competition in the hard disk drive business, he said.

"Shenzhen is a key part of the large economy of the Pearl River Delta. A lot of our customers are moving here," said Thomas.

While acknowledging that there was some nervousness about the Chinese economy and the yuan appreciation, Thomas believes the positive factors in the economy balance the risks. As evidence of his confidence in the economy, he is considering buying property in Shenzhen, even after property prices jumped over 20 percent in the past year. "It (the property price) will definitely go up," said Thomas.

Thomas has been in Asia since the 1990s, when he was a senior manager of IBM. In 2003, he became the vice president and greater China president of Hitachi GST, which was founded that year with the merger of Hitachi's and IBM's hard disk drive businesses.

Thomas does not speak Chinese, but that does not pose problems in managing the company, because his managers speak good English. What's more, he has already built a stable localized management team. There are only 10 to 12 expatriates in the company's 12,000 employees in China, he said.

"We always try to build a local management team. We make it clear that the role of expatriates is to transfer knowledge," he said.

Thomas has rich experience in integrating different cultures in a company, having held a vital position in the transaction merging the global disk drive businesses or Hitachi and IBM. For this merger, he and his colleagues studied 15,000 cases.

Thomas said he had become more patient after coming to Shenzhen. "The Chinese people are more aggressive in the business world, possibly feeling the big urgency for self-development," he said.

Despite his busy work schedule, Thomas makes it a point to enjoy Shenzhen life as much as possible. He visits parks, eats farm vegetables, goes to the beach, plays golf, takes photos of people on street, and buys paintings at Dafen Oil Painting Village. He even practiced his longtime hobby of shooting, at a military base.

Editor: Wing