Karl Long was a marketing management student with “itchy feet” when he landed in China 20 years ago. The Zed Candy general manager for the Asia-Pacific region had found a job through his alma mater teaching English and recruiting Chinese students to study at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), but as a young man away from home for the first time, he was keen to see what the world had to offer.
After landing in Beijing, he was soon on a connecting flight to Harbin in Heilongjiang province, close to the border with Russia, where he would spend the next 18 months “submerged” in the local culture and getting to grips with Mandarin, which he says he is around 70-80% proficient in (“I wouldn’t be able to read a newspaper, but I can make out road signs.”)
Having been more focused on following Ireland’s progress in the 2002 World Cup, the then-21-year-old had done little to prepare for his Chinese odyssey, except getting his braces removed.
“The dentist said ‘What are you doing? They’re not ready,’ he recounted. “I should have never taken them off. She asked me ‘Where are you going?’ I said “China.’ ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ ‘Nah, it should be fine though, right?’”
It was a baptism by fire for Long whose previous experience had been working at the races for Tote and on the deli counters of a number of south Dublin supermarkets. The other Irish expatriates in Harbin kept to themselves; the food was very different; and everyone in his office shared one computer. A phone card from a local kiosk costing the equivalent of €14 allowed him to keep in touch with home, but otherwise he was a world away.
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Long said there would be no reason for anyone from outside Harbin to be here as it was so “off the beaten track” and limited in terms of industry and infrastructure, but he “got stuck in” regardless.
Even as the few Irish there cleared out when SARS hit south-east Asia in late 2002, Long was not put off, saying he wanted to enjoy the culture and do as much travelling as tangibly possible, which he would do across seven different companies in various industries over the next two decades.
After a year-and-a-half in Harbin, he moved to Beijing where he met his Russian future wife and, through contacts at Enterprise Ireland, he secured a job as a business development manager for Taiwanese freight company Dimerco back in the north-east. Long spent two years with Dimerco before joining the Irish Dairy Board as its first hire in Asia to register, launch and promote Kerrygold in China, Hong Kong and Singapore, an experience which he says “molded [him] more corporately.”
Later, in 2009, on foot of the previous year’s Beijing Olympics, he invested in and became managing director of the Paddy O’Shea’s Irish pub, which he would turn into a chain around the capital over the next three-and-a-half years, before divesting and establishing a membership club in Anhui province for Texas-based hospitality company Club Corp. All of which gave him a deep knowledge of how business in China operates.
“All these jobs have different learning curves: with the freight business, you learn the ins and outs of exporting and importing into China, which was useful for registering a product in China, and then you understand the retail and the food service industries, which is applicable when running you’re own business because then you have to work on your own staff, hiring/firing, standard operating procedures, company policies, taxation, cost sheets, margins, supply chain … so you become all sorts of businesses,” he explained.
In 2015, he took up a position as operations manager for Dutchy company Progarments, acting as a go-better for customers, production and their two factories in Hefei, spending five years there, before moving into his current role at Zed Candy, the Irish-founded sweet maker famous for Jawbreakers and Golfballs.
“It was a new industry, but the principles of what I learned in my previous positions were applicable, so my skill set worked quite well working at the factory level with a team of about 250 people,” Long said of his latest career change.
2019 had been a busy and successful year with a number of factory visits, exhibitions in North America, the Middle East and Europe as Zed Candy diversified its product line away from gum, which had previous represented up to 90% of its sales, and into chews and vegan products.
When Covid hit early the following year, however, domestic business dropped 90% initially, according to Zed Candy executive director Brendan Roantree. Long had been in Saudi Arabia before he was informed China would close its borders. He arrived back in late February and hasn’t left since.
Hopes that the pandemic would last a few weeks like SARS were quickly extinguished, and Zed Candy received panicked phone calls from customers asking if they could still fulfil orders. Although the domestic market recovered in late 2020, orders from the west dried up amid rolling lockdowns, forcing the company into crisis management mode with cost and job cuts, deferred projects and operating with skeletal crew.
China’s experience of Covid has been radically different to Ireland’s, however, with the state well able to enforce a zero-tolerance policy. Long’s neighbour returned from the US on 2 January and had been sealed in his apartment for 55 days, receiving daily tests from officials in hazmat suits.
The man is the first person Long knew in China to even have Covid, and people expressed shock when he said that he knew many people in Ireland who had contracted coronavirus, as those who become infected are admitted off to Covid hospitals where they are required to stay for weeks on end. One man Long knows was in a Covid hospital for 58 days after returning from Hong Kong.
Zed Candy has been required to make changes at its factory in Zhangmutou, Dongguan province at its own expense to comply with the state's Covid protocols, hiring doormen, installing security cameras, and getting toilets for visiting lorry drivers.
“Truck drivers are under serious scrutiny because they are coming from a red zone [Hong Kong] into a green zone,” he explained, adding that drivers were only allowed to leave their vehicle to go to the toilet and that nobody at the company was allowed to interface with them.
Long estimates that business for 2020 was down 25% year-on-year, but distributors need for inventory ensured a 15% recovery in sales last year, the level at which he expects Zed Candy to match in 2022, despite rocketing supply-side costs, as he embarks on his third decade in the country.
“The most important thing for working in China is your adaptability. Expect the unexpected. There are ways around things, but you have to be respectful of the local culture,” he said.
“I’ve seen many people come in to be CEOs or regional managers, CEOs of big corporations around the world, multinationals. They come to China, and they leave after three months because what they believe and they know works in multinationals, but in China doesn’t always work because you need to spend time in the culture.
“You need to spend time understanding the way of working here and then letting people know why you want to change something instead of fighting it … You need to be more empathetic with them.”
And where once he and his colleagues in Harbin shared a computer, now Long doesn’t even have a wallet, with all transactions carried out digitally and no need for cash or notes, such have been technological advancements of the country, which can now lay claim to being a genuine superpower.
