REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 25, 1997 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the promotion of John Lauer to vice president, Far East. Lauer will manage Microsoft’s Far East operations from Tokyo, including marketing, sales and support, consulting, and research and development. He replaces Charles Stevens, who held the post for the past three years. Microsoft subsidiaries in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, including Hong Kong, will report directly to Lauer.
“The Far East region has grown rapidly over the past few years and continues to have incredible future potential, ” said Steve Ballmer, executive vice president of sales and support at Microsoft. ” John ‘ s knowledge of the Asian marketplace combined with his excellent business skills will ensure that we continue doing a great job of meeting the demands of customers and growing the industry.” Lauer will report directly to Ballmer.
Lauer was most recently regional director for Microsoft Southeast Asia and before that was general manager of Microsoft Malaysia. He joined Microsoft in 1990 and has held a number of positions since then. Before he joined Microsoft, Lauer lived and worked in Taiwan. He has worked in Asia for eight of the past 11 years and speaks fluent Mandarin.
“I am very excited to be working in this part of the world,” Lauer said. ” We have a wonderful team of people who grew the business at a compound annual rate of 73 percent over the past five years. They accomplished this by working closely with local industry to develop great localized products that meet the information technology needs of our customers.
” Our growth is being fueled by customers rapidly moving onto our platforms,” he said. “We continue to see a shift away from UNIX and mainframe systems onto microprocessor-based technology. Last year, BackOffice® products grew 123 percent in the Far East. In addition, our desktop applications business, particularly the word processing business in Japan, continues to explode. Microsoft® Office has become a standard on the desktop. In order to satisfy this demand, we will continue to invest aggressively in customer technical support, research and development, and consulting in the region.”
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