20-year permanent resident of China: surprise party for our CEO
Colleagues at Siveco China’s Shanghai office and the bluebee® lab R&D center recently organized a surprise gathering for founder and CEO Bruno Lhopiteau, marking twenty years since he was granted permanent residence in China, among the earlier foreign holders of that status.
The team had prepared an outstanding blue cake and a selection of old photographs covering the years since Bruno first settled here. He made a short speech in Chinese, noting that the company and his eldest daughter were born around the same time as he applied for permanent residence in 2004, and closed with: “Twenty years — thank you for being here.”
Bruno’s China story started earlier. At the end of 1999 he relocated full-time to develop infrastructure business for an international firm. Those years coincided with a rapid build-out of Chinese infrastructure, and the work took him onto projects such as Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant, the Three Gorges Project and Shanghai Metro. What had begun as an expatriate posting became the place where he chose to build both a company and a family life. He has now lived in China for more than twenty-five years.
From the start of Siveco China in 2004, Bruno insisted on “maintenance with Chinese characteristics,” aimed at booming Chinese infrastructures and industrial plants rather than imported Western packages, which he has long argued were a poor fit for Chinese projects. Local R&D began almost immediately, and in 2007 the bluebee® lab team in Shanghai released its first product, a mobile solution for field technicians. That same local-development line still runs through the bluebee® Smart O&M platform. The business first concentrated on water and waste, then expanded into other sectors and onto the Belt and Road, to become a global player from China to the world.
During the party, two long-term colleagues, Finance and Administration Director Windy Han and Business Development Director Fiona Yan, pointed out that Bruno’s original choice to work inside the Chinese ecosystem is what led to recent developments, including bluebee®’s compatibility certification with domestic platforms such as DAMENG and OceanBase.
Bruno’s career was previously featured in a CXO interview, a Water Plus article and in this recently published interview. The surprise party was the team’s way of marking that the residence permit, the company and the people who built it have grown up together.
