Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1010078
AUGUST 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 85 am very exciting about that project. We are now working on closing a number of large projects in Vietnam and plan to open a branch office in Hanoi in early Fall of this year. Las Marias: From Optimal Electronics, you rebranded to Optel Software. What's the rationale behind this? Vujosevic: Our software's been called Optel for a long time, but Optimal Electronics Corporation was a little bit confusing for people. Some people are thinking we are doing PCB assembly, while some people are thinking bareboard manufacturing—we want to just let people know right away that we are a software company. So, we rebranded ourselves as Optel Software in China and the U.S., so everything now is branded as Optel Software, including our brochures and marketing materials. Las Marias: While you were on your mission last year, what challenges did you encounter? Vujosevic: Finding the right people. Even now, where we are growing, finding the right people is the most important thing. It is easy to find a customer and promise solutions, but if we fail because we did not hire the right people and we did not deliver on our promises, we will be out of business very quickly. Sales are going so well for us now that my main focus is to build up our organization in Asia and hire right people. We are hiring three more people in August for our Shenzhen office. We are not going to oversell and under- deliver; whatever we can sell, we are going to implement successfully, and that will allow us to grow. We cannot have a single, unhappy customer and that is not easy to do. That is the biggest challenge for us. Chinese companies had not been treated well by our competition and there are a lot of unhappy Chinese customers with failed MES projects. We will not leave such customers behind us and we are now trying to educate them that there is a better alternative, there is a company that will work together with them to make them a better business. Las Marias: So far this year, have you experienced any significant challenges? Vujosevic: Our Chinese company is wholly owned by our American company, so we are not in partnership, and we do not have to disclose software secrets to anybody. We own our company in China. On the other hand, we will have to protect our IP and we are taking steps in that direction, using patents and trademarks, as much as we can. And we are introducing other types of protection for our software in different customer sites. So we are not seeing any obstacles. The company registration process has been slow, but bureaucracy is slow everywhere. We are even finding people interested in investing in our company. We will see how much money we are going to need to grow, and we might even get investments from Chinese investors. Overall, we have had great experience doing business in China. Our customers, prospects, contacts, relationships, Chinese people in general, as well as Sichuan and Hunan cuisines, are highlights of these past seven months. We love it here! Las Marias: What has changed since our conversation last year, when you mentioned that you considered in the past establishing in China, but at the time you did not pursue it? Vujosevic: In my opinion, China did not appreciate software 10-15 years ago. China wanted to buy the hardware; the software they thought could get some other ways. And I did not want any part of it. So, I left and did not come back for 12 years or so. Now, things are different. The owner of our first customer company told me, 'I need to reduce overhead by 40% to stay in business because the labor is getting more expensive.' Customers are demanding more cost cuts. Software will allow him to do that and provide better solutions. So, they are willing to invest in software where they were not willing to invest before. They were just throwing more people into any problem. That does not work in China, anymore.