Thursday, February 03, 2005

Woo people! This is the happening event for the week sia!Today I worked until 8 plus... and althought I'm very tired now, I swear under the moon and stars that I'm gonna blog about the press conference for China Great Land's (CGL) IPO Launch that was held this evening at Suntec Convention Centre.

Call me a mountain tortoise if you want, or maybe you could be someone like me, to attend a press conference by those big shots and take it as an eye-opener. Yes, when I mean big shots it really means BIG, with all those managing directors, CEOs or director or manager of some sort, and yeah, not forgetting the media was there as well. Altogether, there were more than 200 people who attended the event.

But of course, small fries like me, Cheryl Loh and another colleague Andi were asked to handle the reception area, to deal with the RSVP list. Furthermore, because this event is only for those invited guests only, the intended idea was that we have to be firm with those uninvitied guest and turn them away. For every invited guest, we were then required to distribute the press kits (which includes a copy of CGL's prospetus neatly place into a folder together with the press release and their brochure in a beautiful bag. [Note that the first 150 early birds get free gifts as well... a crystal bull and about 200 press kits also comes with a $2 toto ticket for the coming draw(I'm serious)]
So, in short the job is simple, its like marking attandance for a big lecture group, and give them those "goodie" bags as they come.

As the saying goes, reality is harsh, what happened at the reception counter was more like a scene taken off movies like Titanic, where you have those crew members of the ship telling people that it's only for meant for ladies and you see men arguging on that issue. People crowd around the booth and those uninvited guest were insisting that they received invites from Stratagem, or that they sent out their replies late and thus their name was not on our list. When all else fail, they will try to pull along some big shot to throw their weight on us, or start giving us some strange names to get into the room. In the end, we gave priority to those invited guest first and allow those uninvited guest in, after registering their names.

In today's scenario, there were many "so-called" guests who came in for the main purpose of that free $48/- buffet meal rather than being sincerely interested in the shares offer by CGL. At the same time, some SINGAPOREANS were apparently smarter in a sense and found out that their goodie bags had damaged gifts and asked for refunds. -.-. As mentioned earlier, there were about 200 bags with the toto ticket and came this lady who was fussing about one $2 donate-to-charity ticket just because she happened to be the 201st person to take the press kit, and my MD had to calm her down after this "poor" lady has just made a loss of $2.

So with all the people settled in, it is time for the press conference to commence. As usual, MDs of the various companies were there, from CGL and my supervisor was at the panel as well.

So what happened during the press conference? And what about the "chicken-rice war"that happened after that? What are the true colours of these professionals? Stay tune to the next episode with Wilfred from Stratagem Consultants, reporting live from Suntec City Convention Centre .