Altium names Roger Shen regional CEO of Greater China

Previously a sales and support organization, Altium’s Greater China operations will grow along with the Australian-headquartered company as a whole to help electronic designers everywhere build the next generation of electronic products.

“One result of the past 12 months of tougher economic conditions has been a shift in the world's economic center of gravity. That shift continues firmly towards China, said Nick Martin, CEO of Altium. The Chinese electronics design sector continues to move towards creating original designs, part of the national objective to move away from 'made in China' to 'designed in China'. And we continue to see evidence of this trend away from just being very good and very efficient at manufacturing and assembly.

At the same time, the number of young engineers graduating with world-class degrees in engineering continues to increase rapidly, and they are keen to show the world what they can do.

So the changes we've made to the structure of our business in China, and the appointment of Roger, are all about the future. Our intent is to help China's electronic designers make the move from imitating existing product and system concepts, to being able to create new innovative electronic products and thereby support their national aspirations to rise above the ‘made in China’ moniker.

China's designers have a real passion about making a difference in how they design, the products they design, and the application of these products across the world. Our task is to help them fulfill that passion.

Mr Shen, who was born in China and has Australian citizenship, joins Altium from the MAXIMO assets management business unit of Tivoli Software, part of IBM. He joined MRO Software, the company behind the MAXIMO assets management software, in May 1998, became its general manager in Greater China in 1999, and moved with the company to IBM when the latter acquired MRO Software two years ago.

Earlier in his career, Roger worked with Macquarie Research Limited in Sydney, and was with System Software Associates (SSA) in China for nearly four years.

Roger has an M.Sc. in Information Systems from the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from East China University.

Altium's software embraces the programmable, hardware and software design domains uniquely within a single unified application. This architecture helps organizations and designers overcome the real challenges they face: trying to innovate and build next generation connected intelligent products today, while moving away from the traditional fragmented electronic design automation (EDA) design tool flows.