We value our customers and we understand there is no better thing than a VIP treat after a busy day, so same as last year, we held VIP Dinners after the first two exhibition days on Nov 27 and 28 at Shanghai Grand Hyatt Hotel.

During the event, Mr. Mark Dawkins, our General Manager of North America and Europe, has delivered a speech highlighting the challenges of today’s environment and has shared our strategies with our guests on how to keep our customers competitive in this market dynamics as following.

“Recently, we have seen extremely challenging market dynamics. Beginning with the end of 2007 and going through the summer of 2008 pricing on raw materials such as steel and oil reached and maintained record highs. Immediately following this trend the financial crisis began and continues to impact economies around the world. The result is that we find ourselves facing an economy that, even if it is not technically in a recession, sure feels like one.

Despite all of the challenges of today’s environment I am pleased to tell you that World Wide Stationery is still healthy and strong. We realize it is important that we are supply partner that you can trust in and depend on. We strive to accomplish this through continuous innovation, and constant focus on improving the quality of our products and our customer service. Additionally, we continue to invest in improving our productivity through developments in automation and introducing lean principles into our production processes. We are doing this in a responsible way and are very proud to have achieved ISO 14001 certification for being a caring company with regard to the environment.

Focus on these areas help our overall implementation of the Blue Ocean strategy in which our goal is to create uncontested market space and sustainable value for both World Wide Stationery and our customers through innovation. It is important to note, however, that this focus on innovation includes our entire product line with products like the EZ Touch, EZ Comfort, and SmarTouch focused on the premium end of our portfolio, while the EZ Ring is directed at our economy line.

As we look to the future we hope that we can continue to earn your business through hard work, dedication to the areas I outlined earlier, and above all listening to and addressing your needs, the needs of your customers, and ultimately the needs of the consumers. We believe that this can only happen if we continue to build on the close cooperation that we have already established. If we do this, we believe that all of us will not only survive the current tough economic environment, but that there is a bright future ahead for us full of opportunities.”

To spice up the nights, we have arranged a little guessing game. As many of you may know Mr. Simon To, our Chairman and CEO, is a wine appreciator, the prizes for the game were six bottles of stunning Chateau Latour 1982.