I start the post on 2008 mentioning something I forgot in 2007, which was the acquisition by Mestrelab of a new premises. We could see that Carlos’s apartment would soon be outgrown, and we therefore invested in a new office close to the centre of Santiago de Compostela. What we bought was a shell and therefore, part of 2007 and the whole of 2008 would be spent waiting for builders to finish the work they had undertaken to fit it for our purposes. Many say Spanish builders have suffered due to the financial crisis which would unfold later in the year, and that is undoubtedly true, but from our perspective, if we gave this kind of response to our customers, we would not expect to remain in business. 2008 was therefore frustrating from that point of view, as our in-house growth was somewhat curtailed by the lack of office space to place new developers, and therefore our headcount remained stuck at 10 whilst we fought with the builders.

However, we grew in other ways. We grew in product range, as our agreement with Sierra Analytics Inc, also finalized in 2007, to develop an LC/GC/MS plugin for Mnova started to give us a more general appeal for chemists outside the specific NMR community, and thus made us start going to more general conferences. 2008 therefore saw our first attendance at an ACS National Meeting, at New Orleans in April, soon after having our first suite, the Forest Lodge, at an ENC, which was back at Asilomar for its 49th edition. So, we were growing in our attendance to conferences, and also in the size of our presence there. And we were also growing geographically, with our opening of an office in the US, in San Diego, CA, after reaching an agreement with Dr. Chen Peng, who became our new Business Development Director for US and China. We also attended, as vendors, our first MS specialist conferences, with ASMS in Denver and CoSMoS in San Jose being the first ones, whilst repeating at the ACS with a stand at the Fall Meeting in Philadelphia. As for NMR conferences, in addition to ENC, we also attended EUROMAR in St. Petersburg (great city, at least as a leisure visitor), SMASH in Santa Fe and the Spanish Bi-Annual NMR Meeting, held in Seville.

So, whilst World economies where rapidly swinging from a fear of inflation, with the petroleum barrel edging towards $150, to a recessionist panic after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, Mestrelab kept growing and expanding its range. In a year when the Lightning Bolt flew in Beijing and when the Baltimore Shark astounded us all by surpassing Mark Spitz, we were also racing, in our own fashion, towards a more international presence, which even took us to China too, which Chen and I visited in a business development trip at the beginning of November. Thus, as well as starting to open some significant business with the Chinese CRO and pharmaceutical industry, I was in Shanghai to witness the results of the US General Election, which saw Barack Obama become the 44th President and maybe justify his ludicrously awarded Nobel Peace Prize by the single fact of replacing George Bush (not that Bush could have stayed, showing one of the great features of the American Constitution). With this event, our conversations with American scientists became a lot more fluent, as they no longer felt the need to start by apologizing and explaining that they had nothing to do with the election of their incumbent president .

New Office

Our New Office entrance door

And finally, in December 2008, in the middle of World financial turmoil, and just after the inauguration of President Obama and of the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, we also inaugurated our new office, to which  we moved on 12th December, thus gaining some much needed breathing space (anyone who visited us during 2008 will vouch for that) and the ability to grow our team again, which we started duly doing at the beginning of 2009, but that is another story or, at least, another post!

We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!

We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.

You can find more info at our 5th anniversary web page.

Santi Celebrating China, Mnova MS, US Office 1 comment Leave a comment

There are very conflicting theories at the moment as to the role of Marco Polo and Admiral Zheng He in medieval times in the coming together of the Western European and Chinese cultures, and who discovered who. You could do worse than checking out 1434, by Gavin Menzies, to read some alternative history.

I am now following on the trail of Marco Polo, but of course I have no pretensions of discovering China, rather, we are trying hard in Mestrelab to get China to discover Mnova, so far with a relatively pleasing measure of success. Before I get into matters Mestrelab, though, there are a few really amazing things one finds out on arriving in Shanghai, which is an incredibly modern and buzzing city. I was here last November, and I was really taken by surprise by the speed of the developments in this area of China.

The first incredible thing is the district of Pudong, on the East shore of the Yang-Tze river. This was basically farmland 10 years ago, which is truly incredible when you see it now, as the people of Shanghai have built 12,000 (yes, 12,000!) skyscrapers since then in this new part of town. One of them, the Shanghai World Financial Center, I believe to be the 2nd tallest in the World at present, and many others are hugely imposing and spectacular buildings. The realization that all this has sprung from nowhere in 10 years really gives the newcomer a measure of the power of aspiration of the Chinese society in economic terms.

Santi in Shanghai, with the Pu-Dong skyline behind, last November (2008). Click on the photo to view more from the Shanghai album

The next thing that catches your eye is downtown Shanghai. Buzzing with commercial activity, spectacular with a beautiful (and incredibly contrasting from one shore to the other) skyline, and no end of places for the visitor to go to, great restaurants, exciting nightlife, modern facilities. A true metropolis of the XXI century. Check out a few photos, unfortunately spoilt by me and Chen, by clicking on the photo to the left.

The second incredible thing in Shanghai is the Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, and in particular what guys over here call Pharma Valley (I guess in a reference to the very notorious Silicon Valley in CA, US) Pharma Valley is a huge sprawl of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies which have sprung up in Pudong in the last 5 years. It takes close on half an hour to cross it in a taxi and, although I have heard different estimates, it would appear that there are between 100,000 and 250,000 chemists and biologists currently working in and around it. For anyone working in this industry, this is a mind boggling number. Of course, for me, marketing software desktop licenses, this is a sleep depriving piece of information! It is in any case fascinating and I am very lucky to have seen it and happy to have visited it. I think anyone working in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries should do so sometime. The visit is so exciting, that I was inspired to start learning Mandarin after last time (I am still working on that, although with very little time which makes progress frustratingly slow)

The good news for Mestrelab is that we already have some customers in Pharma Valley, people like Alputon Inc. and Hutchison MediPharma Limited, as well as a number of Chinese universities (University of Tsinghua, South China Botanic Garden, Institute of Materia Medica Beijing, National Chiao Tung University, Beijing Institute of Chemistry, Fudan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Defence Medical Center) who are the early adopters of our software. After this visit, I hope to have many more. This week I am going to Shanghai and Beijing, as well as Qingdao. Chen is staying over for nearly a month, and I am sure he will make further progress (for one thing, his Chinese is much better than mine!). We also now have a distribution company working with us, Qingdao Tenlong Weibo Technology Company Ltd. These guys are very professional and hard working, and they will be developing the business for us in China, as they already have a very strong presence in the Chinese chemical R&D market. Qingdao is famous for its beer and its beaches, but maybe there will soon another reason!

I am going to be here for a week, after which I cross the World to go to Brazil (more on that on oncoming posts). I hope to post some photos of the city later in the week and, hopefully, some news on business progress. I may even come up with a little ‘my guide to Shanghai’ assuming I get time to find some good places to visit, eat, drink (not necessarily in that order).

Santi Trips and business development business development, China, Mestrelab in China, Mnova en China No comments Leave a comment