The China Experts: Martin Klimek of Synapticon on Sourcing, Trust and Running a China Team from Germany
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Martin Klimek, Chief Financial Officer at Synapticon, the German motion-control company. This is an unusual episode for the series, because Martin struggles to produce the war stories listeners expect. Synapticon's China story is one of steady progress, and the reasons for that are worth examining closely.
Who is Martin Klimek?
Martin Klimek is Chief Financial Officer at Synapticon, a German-headquartered developer of motion control and robotics technology. He has been with the business for around two years, having had his own connection to China for the previous decade and a half. Synapticon runs a Shanghai operation with a long-serving local general manager, and China is now the company's single most important market. He joins The China Experts to talk about why a global technology company cannot realistically skip China, and how the Shanghai team repaid that decision during the pandemic.
What this episode covers
Why Martin argues a company with global ambitions cannot leave China out of the portfolio
How the Shanghai office pivoted from a pure sales function into a sourcing operation during Covid
Why a local team could qualify component brokers when European manufacturing partners could not
How Synapticon found and kept a general manager it trusts, and hired through his network
The plan to sell direct alongside distributors and build local application engineering
Training a technical team remotely using an internal wiki, regular calls and customer questions
Why the general manager belongs in the monthly finance call, not at the end of a chain of messages
Applying for high-tech enterprise status and what it demands of your bookkeeping
When the sales office becomes the supply chain
Synapticon opened in China with a straightforward commercial brief: a sales team serving Chinese customers. The pandemic changed what that office was for. While the US market largely shut down, China kept absorbing product, so sales continued. At the same time global component shortages started to bite, and the European electronics manufacturing partners Synapticon relied on could not buy from Chinese brokers because they had no way to qualify them and judged the risk too high. The Shanghai team could. They knew how local suppliers operate, they could check who was trustworthy, and they sourced directly so that production kept running, even at reduced volume.
That is a strong argument for putting real people in the market rather than treating it purely as a sales channel. It also means the entity has to be able to trade, contract and pay properly, which starts with China company registration and a finance function that can keep up. Martin's own next step, producing in China for China, would raise the bar again.
Trust is built through people, not policies
Asked about the familiar claim that staff in China are disloyal and turn over constantly, Martin's answer is about how you hire rather than how you control. Synapticon's first general manager left to retire in the US, and the replacement came through connections, someone who knew someone. That general manager has now been with the company for six or seven years, and the rest of the local team has been hired through his network. Martin's summary is simple: it is about people, connections, and the strength of the network you are hiring into.
Not every company arrives with that network already in place. Woodburn supports recruitment in China for firms making their first local hires, and employer-of-record hiring where a team needs to start before the entity is ready. Once people are on payroll, cloud payroll services keep the monthly obligations in order.
Communication, finance and the high-tech status question
The most transferable lesson in the episode is procedural. Woodburn runs the monthly finance calls for the China entity, and early on the general manager was not in them. Information travelled from Woodburn to Martin to the executive director to the general manager, which is exactly how transparency erodes. Putting everyone in the same meeting fixed it. Martin's broader management principle is the same: give people the task, stay close, monitor what happens, and do what you say you will do.
Kristina also flags the high-tech enterprise status the China operation was applying for, which brings preferential tax treatment but only if the criteria are met and the bookkeeping has been kept in the required form. That is a reminder that cloud accounting and financial reporting and disciplined tax and audit work are not just compliance overhead, they determine which incentives you can actually claim. Groups without a finance lead in-country can also consider the appointment of a China finance manager to hold that line locally.
Watch the full interview
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