Matthias Claussen – trader with a recipe for success

It was just under 32 years ago. Matthias Claussen was standing on a rooftop terrace with the vice mayor of Shanghai, and the men were looking across the Huangpu River toward Pudong. “What we saw,” Claussen recalls, was like a “swamp of croaking frogs.” And the German business people smiled mildly when the Shanghai official predicted that Pudong would be home to one of the world’s most modern residential and business centers. “I lacked the imagination for it at the time,” Claussen says today – and does not conceal his high regard for the building achievements of the Chinese over the past three decades. “They have managed to turn a bitterly poor country into a world power.”