John Cheng is executive director of autonomous vehicles and vehicle electrification for Ford Asia Pacific region, based in Shanghai, China.

In this role, John will be responsible for developing and executing the AP strategy for AV & EV and leading all AV & EV initiatives in the AP region. Previously, John was Director, AP Integration based in Dearborn.

John has worked for Ford for more than 25 years serving in a wide variety of roles, including in Business Development, Strategy, Engineering, Marketing and General Management.

For ten of those years, John served in a number of positions with Ford’s Asia Pacific operations in China. Most recently, John was director of Business Development and Export Operations of Ford Asia Pacific based in Shanghai. John was also a key member of the team that developed the strategy to bring Lincoln to China. He led the cross-functional team responsible for launching the historic luxury brand prior to his return to the US in 2014.

During John’s tenure in China, he also served in leadership roles within Ford’s joint venture operations, including Changan Ford Mazda Engine Co. Ltd. and Changan Ford Mazda joint venture assembly plant in Nanjing. He played a key role in the planning, business establishment, plant construction, and vehicle launch of the JV.

David is a transactional and commercial lawyer who focusses on the technology and telecommunications sectors. David advises on tech and telecoms joint ventures and acquisitions, major systems and networks projects, business transformation projects, complex commercial arrangements, data privacy and data ownership issues.

David particularly enjoys transactions which aim to harness the transformational powers of technology in other sectors. With this in mind, he works closely with our clients in the telecommunications, energy, infrastructure, transport and financial services sectors to help structure and implement their technology-driven strategies.

Philip is a trusted advisor to numerous global companies in the consumer products sector and advises them on their biggest and most important disputes around the world. He has worked on a wide range of disputes ranging from complex multi-national commercial matters, investment treaty law disputes and international trade law cases. He also has defended numerous individual and class action products liability lawsuits and advises consumer product manufacturers on issues of regulatory compliance and in judicial challenges of regulation.

He has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law in New York.

Gentry Sayad focuses his practice on international transactions, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and compliance issues and issues relating to intellectual property, dispute resolution, government relations, and China in-bound and out-bound investment. He also has a background in general commercial litigation. Mr. Sayad's industry experience includes clients in the manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, energy, insurance, and agricultural industries and he has represented private equity firms in relation to investments and transactions throughout Asia. He also has extensive experience representing not-for-profit and educational institutions.

Michael is responsible for cloud, bigdata, IOT oriented deep technical, engineering engagement (architecture design, proof of concept, product feature pattern & practice, joint development/incubation) with government, customer and partner to help, enable their digital/cloud transformation on Microsoft intelligent cloud platform & technologies as well as strengthening the cloud native ecosystem.

Michael has 20+ years (12 years at Microsoft) working experiences in IT software industry. He also served as the director of business & operation for Microsoft Server & Tool business (China), and was responsible for the business operation as well as driving strategic outsourcing, engagement with local government, key customers and partners, engineering central services like lab, user experience, etc.
Prior to his assignment in China, Michael served as the director of program management in SQL Server R&D product group at Microsoft headquarter in Redmond, Seattle, United State, where he was responsible for enabling customer and partner to build and deploy applications and ecosystem on MS data platform.

Michael holds a Bachelor Degree of Computer Science from Tsinghua University and a Master Degree of Computer Science from University of Massachusetts.