About

A large global conglomerate with an extremely diversified portfolio of interests, Honeywell is perhaps most notable for its high tech solutions for the engineering, defence and aerospace sectors. The company’s multi-billion dollar revenue stream is drawn in significant part through its Asia Pacific operations, making it a key region for the company. Gerard Willis is general counsel for Honeywell’s Asia Pacific region, which is headquartered in Shanghai, and has adapted to the local market since moving from the US. Willis has stated in the past that negotiation skills assume greater prominence in Asia Pacific when compared to the West, and has made this an integral focus of his strategy for successful contract work in the region. He has also made efforts to reorganise the company in response to the general slowdown of the Chinese economy, with the company now aligned via a new set of business units that carry out their own macroeconomic forecasting. This has also meant rationalising and rethinking non-core business assets, along with increasing capital in core markets and making more efforts to engage in joint ventures where possible, in line with what Willis believes to be a global trend back towards this approach.