Rice will report directly to Stephen Cai, China Sunergy's CEO, and will oversee corporate international expansion and sales and marketing functions with the aim of expanding CSUN's global market presence, promoting the CSUN brand, establishing long-term industry partnerships, and recruiting a first class global sales team.
Rice brings over 25 years' of business development, sales, marketing, distribution, strategy and management experience to China Sunergy. Before running his own Asia-focused consulting firm, he was President & CEO of Fiat Auto China and Vice Chairman of Fiat's US$400 million JV Nanjing Fiat Automotive Company, where his initiatives increased monthly sales volumes more than three-fold.
Prior to that, Rice spent ten years in sales and senior management roles with General Motors Asia Pacific in Japan and China, including Chief Representative and Country Director for General Motors in China. Rice also held executive positions with ALCOA Asia, Tokyo for about seven years. He has managed large scale projects in Asia between Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Indian partners and European and North American counterparts.
He excels at leading cross-cultural-multi-functional teams. His years of experience in the Asia Pacific region provide him a business perspective well suited to building and maintaining enduring, profitable, global partnerships.
Rice, an American from Seattle, is a speaker and reader of Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. He earned an MBA Finance from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Stephen Cai welcomed Rice: "Bob is a talented and experienced senior executive with broad experience across the spectrum of business functions including international sales and marketing. He has a proven track record of dramatically increasing sales, negotiating and developing partnerships, growing product lineups, improving profitability, and leading global teams. Having someone senior by my side focusing on global growth, establishing partnerships, growing our sales, and driving CSUN's brand and market development will allow me to spend more time on strategic management of the company, manufacturing, and supply chain management.. We are thrilled to have Bob on board."
Commenting on his new role, Rice was enthusiastic: "The PV solar industry is on the cusp of explosive growth and is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Chinese companies like CSUN with its own proprietary technologies – rank with the world leaders in design and production of quality, high efficiency solar cells and modules which increasingly are in high demand in the domestic Chinese market as well as in international markets in North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere. I am really looking forward to the challenge of growing China Sunergy's business and the CSUN Brand across the globe. Key to our success will be establishing CSUN as a responsible corporate citizen in the local communities in which we will establish our operations. Also critical to CSUN's global success is creation of long-term partnerships with various functions within the industry."
