American machinery expert aims high with LiuGong

David Beatenbough takes a photo with his colleagues.

He is also a carpenter who makes coasters for beverages by carving the logo of LiuGong onto discarded wood.

Work and life for Beatenbough is wonderful. His only small complaint is the inconvenience for a foreigner to rent a bicycle to commute.

"I don't change jobs often," said Beatenbough, who won the Golden Silk Ball Award (2008), the top award for foreign experts working in Guangxi, and the 2012 title of "Model Worker" in Liuzhou. "I hope I will accomplish a dream when I retire: to let LiuGong be a world-class R&D organization. I also want to let my team enjoy engineering and have a respect for their work." He smiled.

The reason why foreign experts like Beatenbough feel valuable and work well might be that LiuGong has long adopted its strategy of utilizing international talent since 2003.

This strategy provides foreign talent with a competitive salary, but above all, it gives them a good environment and platform to do what they desire to do for the company, said Yu Chuanfen, president of LiuGong.

"Sometimes, we have conflicting ideas over things," Yu said. "But we are able to sit together and solve our problems. We are learning from each other. LiuGong is an enterprise that embraces cultural diversity and multi-national personnel."

According to Off Highway Research, LiuGong is renowned for being one of very few Asian competitors who produce equipment that exceeds international standards. It ranks as the 20th largest construction equipment manufacturer in the world in 2013.