As usual, just before the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year, almost all the members of SMMR get together to participate the annual staff meeting and celebrate the coming New Year. This time, the grand festivity took place at Grand HYATT Hotel, a brand new five-star hotel in Shenzhen, on 2 February, 2010.   In the afternoon, more than 400 participants including some invited colleagues from Erlangen and Oxford came to the meticulously prepared ballroom for the staff meeting. At the meeting, the senior management team members respectively reported the remarkable results during FY2008-2009 in different aspects, such as finance, R&D, application, SCM, etc. As a summary, Dr. Xue Min delivered a very inspiring presentation. By showing some wonderful charts and figures, he made a conclusion that in the passed fiscal year, with the all-out support from the headquarter and tremendous efforts of all SMMR members, SMMR successfully sustained a vigorous development even in times of global financial crisis and finally achieved the best score in the past 11 years. We made the impossible possible! In order to strive for a higher goal, Dr. Xue pointed out that SMMR will further focus on Operational Excellence, People Excellence and Efficiency Improvement in the coming year of Tiger. In traditional Chinese culture, tiger is the King of animals and the symbol of bravery, courage and confidence. Hence we are full of confidence to build up a strong and excellent team this year. In the mean time, Dr. Xue also brought the New Year greetings from Mr. Maerzendorfer. After the staff meeting, with the start of the melodious music, everybody streamed into a joyful world with elaborate decorations. Welcome to the New Year Party! A dance called Attraction, performed by two professional dancers raised the curtain of the party. At the opening speech, Dr. Xue Min addressed some ebullient words and expressed the best wishes to the company and the employees. Afterwards, all senior management members and VIP guests were invited to the stage and drank a toast to everyone. By enjoying the wonderful performances by professional singers and dancers and delicious food of the dinner, all the audience immersed themselves in an ocean of joy and happiness. Remarkably, the Team Award and Key Expert Award made the party reach a climax. This time, the medals of Customer Relations Award, Customer Focused Innovation Award, Operational Excellence Award, High Performance Award and Quality Excellence Award were respectively granted to SCM, APPL, FI&CO, MG and Superconducting Magnet PE/PD Team. Through series of process optimizations and innovations, those teams accomplished their tasks with excellent scores, saved considerable cost from all the links, such as supply chain, application, tax, R&D and production, and made outstanding contributions for the company. They really deserved the award. Speaking of the key expert award, this time, ten excellent engineers in the positions of magnet, system component, RF, software, application and customer service stood out from the crowd and got honored with the title of Senior Engineer. All the awarded teams and persons won warm applauses from the audience. Another most impressive part of this party was a game to compete for making Chinese dumplings. This challenge met twelve game players who were all the top management team members and VIP guests, like Dr. Xue Min, Dr. Rainer Staud, Dr. Leonhard Söldner, Mr. Alfred Weichselbaum, etc. They were divided into six groups, two in each group. Each person could only use either left hand or right hand to cooperate with the other. The group who could wrap the biggest number of dumplings within 2 minutes would be the winner. Could those bosses, especially the German guests who almost knew nothing about making dumplings, accomplish the challenge? This interesting game attracted everyone’s eyes and applauses. To our surprise, each group completed the task well and the quality of each dumpling looked not bad. Finally, the group of Dr. Horst Weber and Dr. Wang Jianmin and the group of Dr.Marc Beckmann and Ms. Sandy Shang tied the first place. From this game, we could clearly learn the distinguished capability in teamwork between those bosses. Happy time always flies. When coming to the end of the party, besides the gladness and gaiety brought by various performances, games and awards, many people also won the favor of fortune from the lucky draws. Happy Chinese Tiger Year! Marketing Department, SMMR