Starwood moves HQ to China for a month
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With its global business increasingly expanding outside its US homebase, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has taken an unprecedented step to move closer to its far flung markets.It is relocating its Senior Leadership Team to China for one month from 8 June to 11 July. Starwood President & CEO Frits van Paasschen and the company’s top executives will be headquartered in Shanghai, where they will conduct day-to-day business on a 12-hour time difference with their “usual” operations in White Plains, New York. Starwood said the move reflects its commitment to the Chinese market, which is now its second largest outside the US.”With properties in nearly 100 countries, Starwood is no longer an American company that happens to run some hotels overseas. Today, we’re a global company that happens to be based in New York,” said van Paasschen. “Eighty percent of our future pipeline is outside of North America, and nowhere is more emblematic of our global growth than China, where we will open one hotel every two weeks this year. China’s spectacular transformation is hard to grasp unless experienced firsthand – it’s the proverbial, ‘you can’t really understand a culture until you buy groceries there.'”From their home base in Shanghai, van Paasschen and seven members of his Senior Leadership Team will conduct daily business in an unconventional effort to understand and ultimately leverage different cultural perspectives and approaches to business. In addition, more than 20 Starwood executives from the US and international locations will join the team throughout the course of the relocation. India too is becoming a key market for Starwood. The company is on track to operate 50 hotels in India by the end of 2012, doubling its presence in the region in just two years. By 2015, Starwood expects to have 100 hotels open or in development.”Already our fourth largest market, India is second only to China in terms of our future global growth,” van Paasschen said recently. “Given India’s growing wealth, infrastructure demands and accelerating stature as a global business hub, our opportunity here is vast.”
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