An Israeli entrepreneur, who jokingly calls his new home 'the sea of Jews', tells Raymond Zhou about his passion for life.

In 2008, Dror Hurvits identified his two "criteria" for selecting Chinese cities that he deemed fit for a Westerner to settle down in.

One was the price of a foot massage, and the other, the availability of Starbucks outlets.

The price of the former has gone up considerably, he laments, but his favorite coffee is now available in a dozen shops across Zhuhai, Guangdong province.

Hurvits, an Israeli expatriate businessman, has a sense of humor his Chinese colleagues may have difficulty understanding. When asked if he gets the chance to meet other Israelis in China, he jokes: "Zhuhai means sea of Jews."

Zhu is the Chinese word for pearl or jewel, but reads like "Jew" and hai means sea.

"For all I know, I'm the only Jew in this city," he adds.

Hurvits is the CEO of Advanced Chip Carriers & E-Substrate Solutions, or ACCESS, a technology company he founded with China's Founder Group. It went into production in 2010, "showing strength in the first two or three years", and now has 700 employees and $60-70 million in annual revenues. In addition, it has developed and filed some 200 patents worldwide.

To translate to laymen's terms, the substrate is the structure that houses the chip. There is the subsequent process of placing the chip on the substrate, which is called "assembly". It is a business dominated by Japanese, South Korean and Taiwan companies. And Hurvits wants to vault over them by combining the substrate and assembly processes, so seamless that "you won't know where the chip ends and the package starts".

In the next step, ACCESS will "influence" how the chip functions, which will help the company "evolve from a certain industry to another segment".

"I want to ride on the tail of the dragon and get closer to the end user," Hurvits says. He sees his joint venture as "a Chinese company taking control" even though he and his Israeli colleagues brought some of the "tier-one technologies" for the startup.

"It was an interesting experiment because foreign companies usually take control when having such partnerships with Chinese," he says, and describes his China experience in the metaphor - "climbing on the rocket".

Created in China

His company's clients are "big semiconductor manufacturers in the United States and elsewhere", and "we don't have much competition (in China) to speak of", he explains.

"When we do, we'll be at the next stage, changing the supply chain with destructive technologies." The purpose of "stepping up the supply chain" is to generate new industries, he says. "After seven years of operation, we're finally getting some attention."

Even with Founder's weight behind it, ACCESS was not, until now, on the radar of public or government attention, which he sees as the "tool" to speed up innovation.

Some of the "innovation" that ACCESS is working on includes technologies for the wireless industry and high-power chips. With 5G, Hurvits says, it won't just be about the size and rate of the data, but about "integrity". Taobao will send you a package with a drone and you'll buy a self-driving car, he illustrates. "You cannot allow one millisecond of non-interaction."

"This is where we are going and this is where China is going," he says. "In the next 10 years, there'll be some real innovation coming from this country."

Hurvits calls himself lucky to be part of a journey to the future when people will purchase products "created in China" rather than "made in China".

Trained in Israel and exposed to work culture both in Germany and the US, Hurvits isn't a Silicon Valley fan. "We are living in the Bay Area (right now)," he says, likening Shenzhen and Zhuhai to parts of the San Francisco Bay Area where Silicon Valley is located.

China's "Bay Area" has a way to catch up with its American counterpart, he adds.

Hurvits describes China as somewhat a "fusion reactor" combining different facets while presenting a homogenous facade. This is the first "big anomaly" he noticed about the country, with the ancient roots of tradition on one side, and with things evolving all the time, on the other. Sometimes, it is hard to determine which side is dominant.

Two cultures

Driving in China can be "a big mess", he says, adding that he took up driving to gain freedom. He isn't bothered by the constant cutting off of other vehicles and pedestrians because he realizes "it's live and let live".

While both Chinese and Israeli culture emphasis education, Israelis tend to think "out of the box", and Chinese are more "disciplined and organized, putting everything in their own shells".

"These qualities come in handy when we have a company that must be innovative but also requires mass production. But life is analog, not digital, so we should not be blinded by these generalizations," he qualifies.

"The necessity of the Chinese people to always move in a group," Hurvits has noticed, "means they rarely challenge you, be it an authority or a law of physics."

When his Chinese colleagues don't agree with him, they'll tell themselves, "He is a foreigner", a magic word that seems to justify all responses, he says, adding that there's a lack of equality in such an attitude. "They are either looking up or looking down."

But he finds ways to bring balance within his team.

Outside of work, Hurvits loves to travel. He has mastered the subtlety of the Cantonese morning tea, which eludes not only foreigners but most Chinese outside the Pearl River Delta. "The dim sum in the US never tastes like the one here," he says. "I always say, 'Don't eat Western food in Zhuhai. Eat Chinese instead'."

Yang Yang contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

Dror Hurvits likens his new home in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, to parts of San Francisco Bay Area where Silicon Valley is located. Provided To China Daily

(China Daily USA 04/20/2015 page9)