Page 135 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

rience have been hired to supplement the rough-hewn local team, and Tang
has become the chief strategy officer. A Stanford grad with U.S. and Asian
experience at tech and venture firms, Tse knew such steps were inevitable
when he funded Lingtu four years ago.
The two new execs were snatched from the Hong Kong-listed China.com,
which parent company CDC Corp. recently downsized and restructured. The
new CEO, Albert Lam, was head of China.com for two years and earned
managerial stripes from Motorola, Nortel, and General Electric. The new
CFO, Vincent Leung, began his career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and spent
two years running CDC’s mergers and acquisitions department before
working alongside Lam as CFO at China.com. With a road show to
prospective investors in the world’s financial capitals in the offing, Lingtu
needs leaders who know how to talk the talk of Wall Street and look the part.
“Because they are expats, they present a better public face to the outside
world,” says Tse.
The new execs offer a black-and-white contrast to the specialized niche skills
of the founding team. Lingtu’s head of research and development, Sun Jiang, is
former CEO Tang’s classmate from the technically oriented Dalian Maritime
Institute and has a Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Science. The chief tech-
nology officer, Sun Yafu, is a former researcher with a national geographic lab
and has a master’s degree in computer mapping from Wuhan University. The
chief software architect, Sun Qingwen, earned an undergraduate degree from
and finished some master’s studies at the Chinese Academy of Science. Of the
four cofounders, Tang is the only
one who has traveled to the United
States, and that was just once, to
Silicon Valley and Seattle on
“Cell phones with built-in GPS will become
business for Lingtu.
standard just as camera phones are now the
The day after I hear about the norm.”
management switch, I interview the
new CEO, Lam. He outlines his Albert Lam,
vision of shifting Lingtu to the con- CEO, Lingtu
sumer market. With Chinese own-
ership of middle- to high-tier phones
and passenger cars on the upswing,
that’s where the growth and the immediate payback are. Lam also is transi-

Lingtu—China’ s Navigator 109