Ruben Rengel’s life is surely one of the most unusual in the world of pro AV. Raised in Barcelona, Spain, he is the only non-Chinese member among the 15 executives on the top board at Absen. But Rengel is also something of a double exile – living in Yokohama, Japan, with his Japanese wife and two daughters, while working in China. Most weeks, he boards a four-hour flight to commute to Absen’s headquarters in Shenzhen. At board meetings, he communicates with colleagues using a combination of advanced AI systems and a human translator.
A lot of westerners couldn’t cope with the cultural alienation. But Rengel has thrived since becoming Absen’s first non-Chinese employee in 2013, when he was appointed managing director, Europe and Oceania. In the intervening years, regular promotions led to his appointment earlier this year as executive vice president, strategy and business development. It places him at the heart of Absen’s global expansion plans.
He says: “Reaching the maximum executive level at Absen is an honour. I felt it was a way for the chairman to give me a more strategic role as a reward for doing a good job. He wants a team of executives with different points of view and I’ve had a lot of experience in Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific. I also helped to set up our operations in India.”
ADAPTION ABILITIES
Rengel puts his success at Absen down to his open-mindedness and ability to adapt. Without those qualities, such a complex life flying back and forth between two foreign cultures would quickly become intolerable. Many westerners, he observes, arrive at Absen’s HQ in Shenzhen, but find themselves all at sea in interactions with their Chinese colleagues.
What has helped him, he believes, is living in Japan and being married to a Japanese woman. Though in some ways very different, both China and Japan are what he describes as “high context cultures”, whereas Western culture is “low context”, which means being more direct in communications. “But in China and Japan, you can’t understand what they mean by words alone, he says. “You have to ‘read the air’ and constantly decode it. Japan is even more like that than China. It has the highest context culture in the world. But also in China, for a lot of westerners it’s difficult to do meetings and talk to management. Giving and receiving feedback is totally different to Europe,” he adds.
Rengel has learned to intuit what is being said and not judge people for being cryptic. But many westerners don’t have his patience, or his Japanese lifestyle experience. “It could be very frustrating if you were used to a more direct culture and unwilling to adapt. We’ve lost some talented professionals because they couldn’t understand many things. I try to act as a bridge and translate what is meant. But many people come here to Absen’s HQ and get frustrated as they feel management is not listening and nothing is happening. And I tell them ‘believe me, they are listening, things will happen. Don’t worry’.”
One of Rengel’s most important roles is to interview candidates for senior leadership positions worldwide, excluding the US and China. It’s critical to develop local talent quickly because of Absen’s plans to become a truly global company. But most of the time Rengel rejects the interviewees because he feels they are incompatible.
“I am always the last to interview a person when we hire a managing director in Mexico, or India,” he says. “Many times I don’t think they’d be a good match. You need a mind that is very open to Chinese culture with so many decisions being taken there. We’re building local teams, but they need to be aligned with the values of a global brand, which is built around honesty, gratitude and responsibility. But the most important quality is flexibility. I need to feel they would be able to understand what it means to work for a Chinese company. That’s why I often think that they could be a great fit for a Samsung, or an LG, but not for Absen.”
DISMANTLING TELEVISIONS
Rengel’s career trajectory could have been predicted by observing him at 10 years old dismantling the family television set when his parents were out. He innocently wanted to understand how the electronic components fitted together. His father was not best pleased at the time, but Rengel’s curiosity led him to study electrical engineering at university in Barcelona.
His first steps in the AV world were directly influenced by his father, who was the manager of a packaging design company in Barcelona. Rengel recalls his father’s eyes shining with admiration whenever he spoke of Barco’s CRT monitor as the “best in the world”. Naturally, after university, when Rengel saw an advert for a customer support engineer at Barco, he applied and got the job in 2003.
Even more than the technical aspects, Rengel enjoyed building relationships with clients. And in January 2005, he transferred into a commercial role, becoming a sales manager in Barco’s LED business for the next four years. He relished taking important decisions and, over the next few years, moved gradually into senior roles, including two years as sales director at IMAGO Screens. He also studied for an MBA in Barcelona.
When Absen headhunted him with an offer to kickstart its European operations in 2012, he had already been living in Spain for eight years with his wife Mayu. Although Absen wanted him as managing director for Europe and Oceania, the role was based at its Shenzhen HQ. But the couple had a two-year-old daughter and Mayu didn’t want to move to China. Rengel called the chairman and explained his dilemma.
“I said ‘I’m sorry, I’m not able to come to the HQ. But my Japanese wife is okay to move back to Japan and I’d be in the same time zone’. I was expecting the answer ‘no’, but before I’d even finished speaking, he said ‘Ruben, that’s no problem at all!’. And that’s how I started my life in Japan, or I should say Japan and also China.”
TURNING JAPANESE
The family moved to Yokohama, about 20 miles from Tokyo, where Absen has an office. Ironically, in those first few years, Rengel had to spend most of his time in Europe setting up operations, including organising a major partnership with the distributor Midwich in the UK, and setting up the European HQ, near Frankfurt, Germany. “All the travelling was quite challenging for my family,” he admits.
In 2018, Absen promoted Rengel to senior vice president, global business development, leading growth strategy globally, including building local teams and strategic partnerships. The travelling continued, but it was now even more international, with responsibilities for far-flung places like South America and India. He also somehow found time to study for an executive MBA at the world-renowned Harvard Business School.
Half-jokingly, Rengel says that if his wife had been Spanish they would have been divorced years ago. Whereas, as a Japanese woman born into a work-centric culture of high corporate conformity, she is more able to tolerate his absences. In their social circle, his prolonged departures are not even that unusual. “I have barbecues at my home and many of my wife’s friends’ husbands spend less time than me at home even though I fly so often to China and around the world,” he says.
Adapting to life in Japan required a similar openness as integrating with the culture at Absen. Despite an abiding love for Spanish omelettes, tapas and Jambon, as well as – of course – Barcelona Football Club, he has grown to appreciate the uniqueness of Japanese culture. He likes the respectfulness, the way no one raises their voice in the metro, for example. And he has embraced the country’s passions.
Rengel’s father-in-law has been a big influence, introducing him to the nuances of baseball which he once considered boring, and persuading him to take up golf. “He loves golf and he told me it is an important game for business in Japan as so many clients play. It’s much more popular than in Spain. And it has become a real passion,” he says.
Meanwhile, the desire to immerse himself in Japanese life inspired a visit to a kendo club where Rengel donned protective armour and brandished a bamboo sword in the traditions of samurai warriors. It turned out he had a real talent for the traditional martial art. “I wanted to be in a place where nobody spoke English so I could improve my language skills. And it’s such a Japanese thing to do. I love it and have achieved quite a good level of black belt first dan.”
TRICKY INTEGRATION
By far the hardest part of integrating was learning Japanese.
At first, he became quite desperate thinking he would never succeed. “My brain was completely closed and I remember coming home from my lesson one day and saying ‘it’s impossible, I will never do it’. I was so frustrated.”
But he persisted, adopting a rule of studying for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. Doors slowly opened in his mind and the grammar began to make sense. Pronunciation was hard, but it consoled him that Chinese was harder still. It took years, but gradually, he became a fluent speaker. Now, he and his wife converse in Japanese, where once Spanish and English had been required. Rather miraculously, the couple has also found names for their children – Aina, 14, and Yuna, 7 – that reflect their dual Japanese-Catalan identities. “Aina is a very Japanese name but it’s also a Catalan name. And the same is true of Yuna, which means ‘moon’ in Catalan,” he says.
Although the work-life balance is not ideal, Rengel enjoys his job at Absen. Most of all, he relishes the real-world impact of the technology. “I really love it when I go to a major sports event with my daughters and I can say ‘look at that big LED billboard up there. That’s Absen’s product’. Or when we go to airports and see our screens everywhere. It makes me proud that my company is doing all that stuff,” he explains.
Over the next decade, Absen will have two main focal points, one technical and one strategic. The former is, of course, related to AI. “We believe the future of screens will be closely related to this tech becoming much less of a stupid machine and more of a platform of communication and interaction with the audience. And we’re working hard to develop products for that,” he says.
The strategic priority is rapid expansion. In the next few months, there will be new showrooms in Mexico, Brazil and India, he says. Last year, there was an opening in London. He adds: “We keep expanding our physical presence because we want the technology to be near the markets and the clients. It’s an exciting time at Absen and for me personally.”
