Radiant at 30 – Staff Stories: Dreams Come True in China

Stone Jiang is Radiant’s Vice President of Global Sales. He first joined Radiant in 2012 to lead our China sales team, based out of the newly opened Radiant Shanghai office.

I joined Radiant in February 2012. This picture was taken my second day, while (then-CEO) Paul Carragher, Doug Kreysar and Hubert Kostal were in Shanghai, with the entire Radiant China team at that time. We had a celebration dinner for the new office opening—it was an exciting moment!

At that time, we had only one Key Account customer in China, a manufacturer for a large US consumer product brand. It was the first time our cameras were being used for production-line inspection, and it was a success. My mission was to open the door in China to new manufacturing customers. I recruited a full sales team and since then the business in Asia has grown many times over, adding customers in China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Asia.

Radiant China in 2012, left to right: Stone Jiang, Rich Dietz (then CFO), Doug Kreysar (current CEO), Karen Zheng, Paul Carragher (then CEO), Robin Li, Hubert Kostal, Franky Zou, Li Sun, Hoyt Yang, Tailen Huang, Harry Zhou.

On-Site Support Engineers

Production-line automated optical inspection (AOI) has become a significant part of our business, and at least 60% or 70% of the mass production business has been here in China. To support those production customers, we also needed to build up our local applications engineering team. 

We’ve put our application engineers near the factories where customers are using our products. The manufacturing business here can be 24/7 and customers need support on site. We have engineering staff in locations all over China now, working at customer production facilities every day.

Defining the Dream

I started as the China General Manager, building a sales organization including Tony Xue as sales manager for mainland China and Jackie Yu as sales manager for the Taiwan area. In 2013, we had our first Greater China sales meeting, and we defined our dream: to win the first $1 million customer contract in China. 

In 2013 we had the first Greater China sales meeting in Suzhou. From left to right: Tony Xue, Jacky Yu, Stone Jiang, Li Sun, Almond Feng.

Within the next year we achieved that dream, landing a new mass production customer in China with a >$1 million order. More production customers with >$1million orders soon followed and we had significant growth in 2014-2016. In 2015 we started to focus on growing our business in the Korea market, and I became VP of Asia Key Account Sales. Now we have an office and significant consumer electronics customers in Korea also.

A Story in Pictures

In 2016, Doug came to China to visit a new installation of Radiant inspection equipment at a flat panel display (FPD) customer factory. It was his first meeting with this customer, who is headquartered in Beijing. So we traveled around Beijing and visited the Great Wall and other major sites.

Left: Li Sun, Doug Kreysar and Stone suit up for a production factory tour. Right: Doug and Stone at the Great Wall.

Since then, the business has continued to grow as we’ve added multiple large OEM and supplier manufacturing customers at locations throughout Asia. In 2019, I moved to the US to lead sales in the US and Asia from the Redmond office. We created a “one team” strategy to coordinate business development across all our global sales teams. 

A Growing Business & Team

When I look at the last 10 years, I’m very proud to see how the business has grown with many customer successes, and thanks to an excellent team of employees. This next picture was taken in January 2020 at our Asia Team New Year’s party—it was the last face-to-face gathering we had before COVID-19. But even with the challenges of the pandemic, Radiant has continued to achieve strong performance in the business, hitting some record highs.

January 2020 All-Asia Team Building and New Year’s Party in Xiamen, China.