Wolfgang Shih

Since September 2013 I am Managing Director of BEAVER INTERNATIONALGmbH, located in Solingen in the Northwest of Germany (http://www.beavergroup.de or http://www.smithlight.de).

BEAVER INTERNATIONAL is in the business of desiging, producing and marketing of portable, battery powered LED flood lights and related equipment.

Between Oct. 2009 and May 2012 I have pursued my MBA studies (F&A) at the University of Liverpool (UK) and have successfully completed all required modules.

From 1992 -2009 I had been working for the Columbus McKinnon Corp. (NASDAQ 'CMCO'), one of the global market leaders in hoisting and materials handling, in various functions like China President, Product & Materials Manager and MD Asian Operations. The main part of his activities was to set up the two manufacturing facilities in China, the Hong Kong branch and the distribution operation in Thailand. The initial investment was very small (4 x 100K US$) with 8 employees in 1992. In the first 12 years I achieved an aggregate annual growth of 47% y/y with a net profit before taxes between 18%-23%. During this time I used my entrepreneurial spirit and corporate autonomy to introduce 6 major entirely new product lines while implementing all the additional (and completely different) manufacturing processes and technology in the factories. In 2004 I restructured the entire management and implemented Lean, JIT, Kanban, Kaizen, SOX and ISO 9000 compliance, and SAP in the company. In 2009 the organization had grown to 375 people with total revenues of ~ US$ 20 Million representing a major supply base and distribution point for the world wide operations of Columbus McKinnon.
It is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-functional environment, where I encountered constant challenges which required a true generalist leader to run the four separate operations. I have travelled to 52 and lived in 9 different countries, where I have learned to speak 5 languages