Jan Hebnar is an owner and CEO of SINOVIA, which deals with a trade with China and also provides consulting services in this field. The ambition of Jan’s company is to enable Czech companies to reduce production costs by professional outsourcing, and to help them penetrate the complicated Chinese market.

From 2013 to 2016, Jan worked as a director of Kinex Shanghai – the Chinese subsidiary of HTC (owning also Czech ZETOR), which he founded in 2013. As a manager of the Asian headquarters, he was responsible for a budget of more than 120 million CZK and led a team of five nationalities. Prior to engaging in the private sphere, he worked as a diplomat at the business department of the Czech Embassy in Beijing from 2009 to 2013, and before as a director of the European Union department at the Ministry of Industry and Trade. He finished his studies of law at the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University, international relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University and an MBA at Peking University.

In his free time, he is interested in Asia, Asian economy, society and culture, and he lectures intercultural management, strategic management and international negotiations at universities in Shanghai. He is a member of the Supervisory Board at the European Chamber in China and an editor in chief of Shanghai Plus, an occasional magazine devoted to doing business in China published by the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Shanghai. He is an author of the Doing Business with China publication (MF Dnes, 2015) as well as a number of reference articles and studies.

As a lecturer, he prefers a maximum use of case studies. He aims to prepare students for the fact that 21st century will not be the century of Euro-American civilization anymore, but rather the century of Asia, both in social and economic terms.

Motto: "It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness." - Confucius -