Dr. James Yuann

Managing Director

Shanghai

Dr. James K. Yuann (Jim) is Managing Director of Boyden China. Before Boyden, Jim was President of Asia Pacific for Honeywell’s Specialty Materials (SM). During his tenure, Jim built the SM Asia Leadership team, doubled SM Asia revenue to US$820M with 1200 associates, relocated Honeywell Asia headquarters from Singapore to Shanghai and established a global technology centre there.

Prior to Honeywell, Jim was General Manager of Asia of PolyOne Corporation, the world’s largest specialty polymer manufacturing and service company for nearly ten years.  During his tenure, PolyOne Asia expanded from a one-man operation with US$2M of import sales to more than five hundred associates with $100M in revenue, and five manufacturing plants located in China, Singapore and Thailand. The Shanghai Mayor honoured Jim with the Magnolia Award, identifying PolyOne Asia as one of the best performing foreign enterprises.

Jim started engaging in Asian business in the early 1980’s by first marketing products, later licensing technology and subsequently establishing ten manufacturing sites in Asia.  During his earlier career, Jim held responsibilities in engineering, projects, marketing and sales, technology licensing business development and general management in the US for Monsanto Co, Occidental Oil Company and BP America. Jim has years of experience in starting up and managing China operations. He attributed his success to building competent teams with the right talents.  Jim specializes in industrial search assignments with a focus on energy and chemicals, technology, operations and project sectors.

Jim is passionate about developing young executives. As a visiting professor, he lectures on Leadership, Execution Asia and Operation China in the IMBA program collaborated between MIT (Sloan) and Fudan University.  Jim is on the McDonnell Academy Advisory Board of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and an Asian Council member of the AMA (American Management Association). He speaks frequently in many international conferences and business schools on globalization, corporate politics and China Operations. He is the author of the recently published popular book ‘SuperTrends of Future China’.

Jim has a D.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, a M.S. in Materials Science from University of Cincinnati and a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University.