Monthly Archive for: ‘April, 2012’

I recently came back from China after attending our global strategy meeting along with meeting a few key suppliers. It was quite an experience to be able to see the local culture along with eating every meal with chopsticks (I believe I held my own). We even toured the area seeing Mt. Laoshan, Qingdao Beach, the beer museum & the Olympic sailing pier. When driving to Mt. Laoshan, I was looking at all the buildings and their roofs. When I saw every building had clay tile roofs, I thought to myself “they must use a lot of Barium Carbonate!”

Now, everyone asked me when I returned was “What did you eat??” Being my first time, I made sure I tried everything at least once to ensure I had the full experience. We had food ranging from donkey, jelly fish, sea slugs, cow tongue, duck tongue to various parts of the pig along with trying (a lot) of “Tsingtao Beer”, the local favorite! I can’t wait to travel overseas again.

- Tom

BassTech just concluded our annual strategy meeting. This year, BassTech-ers from our offices in Englewood, NJ, Chennai, India and Dessel, Belgium descended on our office in Qingdao, China. We met to discuss the exciting things we accomplished in 2011 and to plan for what has already begun as a record setting 2012. We spent 3 days working together and discussed all of our product lines from specialty chemicals, engineered polymers and plastics, APP, APAO, products for the refractory industry, PE wax, etc.

In addition to working together, some of us had the opportunity to meet with a few customers in China and also visited with one of our long term suppliers.

We are all looking forward to our next meeting at the end of this year at our headquarters in New Jersey.

- Sam

Just returned from the St. Louis Refractory Symposium in St. Louis. I was traveling with Erwin (picture attached), our technical representative from Chemische Fabrik Budenheim. Coming from a long drive from upstate NY (within a hour or two from the Canadian border) through eastern Pennsylvania and a flight to St. Louis, we welcomed being able to stay at least two nights in one place. This was only our second time attending this show, but it definitely had more attendance than last year. We were treated to a hockey game as the conference’s kick-off event. We laughed with our European friends that in the US, we do not add the word “ice” in front of hockey. In Europe, the term hockey refers to field hockey.

- Tom