Candy Chan is our VP Marketing & Logistics (M&L) for the Asia region, which includes key markets like Korea, Japan, southeast Asia and Australasia excluding China. Her team oversees maintaining relationships with existing customers, building relationships with new customers, and ensuring our entire supply chain works to deliver methanol when and where it’s needed in the most cost-effective way possible, coordinating with our global supply chain.
It’s a big jump from her start in a lab testing chemicals to her leading our Asia M&L team.
What led you to start your career in the lab, and how did you make the jump to a marketing office?
The change from a lab to an office wasn’t quite so jarring. I studied chemistry in university here in Hong Kong, and I loved it. When I got my master’s degree, I liked doing research, conducting experiments and making new chemicals. However, there were no relevant R&D centres in Hong Kong to continue pursue my interests. Instead, I started in a food lab after I graduated. Soon, I found my work was too structured and repetitive. I would run the same sorts of tests on the same product and work through a very specific check list.
I decided to look for new challenges. At that time, a multi-national chemical company was hiring logistics specialists, and they wanted to hire people with diverse backgrounds to introduce new ways of thinking into their logistics operations. They hired someone with a logistics degree, one with an economics degree, and me, with my chemistry degree. Even though the position was in logistics, working at that company was still connected to my degree and chemistry knowledge.
I feel fortunate that I worked there for more than 8 years, as I got involved in many different projects that exposed me to Responsible Care management, supply chain planning and six sigma.
What brought you to Methanex?
I wanted to grow into a people leader role. At that time, Methanex had planned to move their Asia M&L office from Auckland, New Zealand, to Hong Kong, and they were hiring a supervisor for customer service and logistics. I felt that my experience in logistics and supply chain for chemicals was a great fit, and I happily made the trade to take on the new and bigger challenge of leading that newly-formed team.
You’ve been with Methanex for nearly 20 years now. Do you still find it challenging?
Yes, I continue to find my career fulfilling and my role to be challenging!
When I joined, we were establishing the new office and Asia region, which included China, and we grew from a small office with just a few employees to a large team with dozens of employees, so it was an incredible journey to lead people through that growth. I got to learn the business, our operations, the commercial side of our work, and how to build teams and an organization – how we should organize, how to set our people up for success to work together well.
In addition, the methanol industry is cyclical, and while there are certainly some predictable things that happen within each cycle, the macro factors continue to evolve over time, which means we need to continue to be creative in how we weather short-term challenges and yet create long term values through the cycles. Between the cycles and the fact that our industry is always evolving, there continues to be something new every year that provides an interesting and new challenge.
You’ve been quite regularly taking on increasingly senior leadership roles. Can you reflect on what you’ve done to position yourself for those roles?
I think there are two things:
- Support from leaders
- Being okay with being vulnerable
We talk a lot at Methanex about how growth is a partnership between employee and leader, and I’m grateful that I’ve had supportive leaders throughout my career who trusted my capabilities and were willing to put me in stretch roles so I could grow and learn.
Of course, you can only grow from opportunities if you go for them, and for me that meant being open and vulnerable. Especially in different cultures, it’s not always easy to speak up when you need help, so that can be a barrier to stepping up into something new. You have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone, not just in the work you’re doing, but also in how you do the work.
I see examples of this across our M&L team, and I think we’re in a lucky position, because while our market is Asia, our work requires a lot of collaboration and connection across our global business. That exposure to different markets, people, working styles – it provides regular opportunities to lean into different styles and comfortably step out of your comfort zone.