Last week Fred Crooks was at UC Davis as the keynote speaker during a full day of training for a delegation of 20 Chinese executive directors and senior business managers from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) and its subsidiaries. Chen Bo, Deputy Director of Financial Operations led the delegation.
The purpose of this visit was to learn about US business best practices. Fred, along with his colleague Neil Paschall from the McLean Group, gave presentations on the following topics:
– American modern corporate theory and governance structure
– Corporate merger and acquisition processes in the US
– Characteristics of mergers, acquisitions and restructuring in the US
– Post-merger integrations that help to improve the effectiveness in achieving the firm’s operational and strategic goals, as well as, comply with US laws and regulations
The presentation was enlightening to AVIC members and very successful. Learning to speak with an interpreter was an interesting feature of giving a new presentation and something that took a bit to get used to, however as the presentation continued, Fred quickly built rapport with many of the members.
AVIC is a very large state-owned enterprise and an investment institution that owes approximately 200 subsidiaries. It has 480,147 employees with total assets of over $81.9 billion (USD) and is one of the Fortune Global 500 enterprises. In recent years, AVIC has diversified their business into many different sectors rather than their traditional roles in the aerospace industry. They’re actively exploring the opportunities of investing in United States businesses.