When Yao Wen arrived in Germany on November 1, 1985, she had just turned 21. She had $ 30 in her pocket and was not allowed to take more with her. At that time China was completely isolated from the West, the rules were strict. She didn’t even have enough cash to buy a train ticket to Augsburg, where she wanted to study and where she knew a professor. “It was a moving moment to come here alone,” she says.
Who was lucky. She met people who helped her and arrived in Augsburg. She studied there, received a scholarship and graduated with honors. She did not see her parents for eight years; she wrote letters that took a month in the mail. But she settled in, made friends with home-cooked Chinese food that hardly anyone knew at the time – and laid the foundation for a great career in the foreign country.
Today, Yao Wen is an entrepreneur. The 56-year-old had a steep career at Siemens – and then left Siemens when things were going best. After completing her studies, she was noticed by the computer manufacturer Siemens Nixdorf, which urgently needed help with contacts to China. She did not stay there long because they needed her even more urgently at Siemens headquarters. From Munich she established Siemens’ supply relationships in China, where she bought individual parts for the company when the others were a long way from being able to do so.
Without whom, the German economy would look different
Siemens sent her to Hong Kong for a few years in 1992, from where she helped set up purchasing offices in China. “At that time there were hardly any other German companies there,” she says. “I was a real front woman.” The Chinese contract manufacturers like Foxconn were then still very small companies with 200 employees. Who did the founders get to know and establish a network. It was so successful that other German companies approached Siemens. Wen returned to Munich and headed a new department: In the future, she also bought components for third-party companies in China, a billion-dollar business. Without whom, the German economy would look different, especially relations with China would be different. Worse.
When Siemens wanted to focus more on its core business, the company put its department up for sale. “I wanted to continue the business I founded,” says Wen. Together with her Siemens colleague Dimitrios Bachadakis, she bought the department out of the group – and became an entrepreneur in 2004. “We were immediately profitable,” she says. “On the day we made the transfer of operations, we immediately had eight million euros in order backlog. That was exciting as a start-up.”
Wen has now received the Munich Business Prize for Women, La Monachia, for her story of women entrepreneurs. Today, around 50 employees buy electronic components, solar cells and raw materials from more than 30 factories in Asia and distribute them to more than 35 factories around the world. Every second household in Europe has housewares that contain a component procured by your CIP Group, such as electronic circuit boards for refrigerators. Her company is also currently developing an electric cargo bike called Mocci, which will be used in factories and warehouses. The parts business has been difficult since the pandemic, after all, many factories in China were closed for a long time and space on container ships was rare. But Wen’s network helped her get enough components to her customers anyway, she says. “It took a lot of our energy, but we didn’t cause a single disruption to our customers.”