The Man Who Flew In to Listen
When ROSON's delegation visited our Pasig showroom, one thing struck everyone in the room: the CEO himself sat at the table for hours, asked questions, and wrote down our answers. "We don't want to only place the order and finish the shipment," George Chen told us. "We want to know how you work here, what support you need, and how we can help."
That sentence is not a slogan. It's how he runs the company. This is the story behind it — drawn from our week with him in Manila and from his own words in ROSON's anniversary film, which you can watch below.
A Son, and His Father's Notebooks
George came to ROSON from the corporate world — fifteen years in Shanghai with global companies including P&G and LEGO — before joining the family company in 2020, fifteen years after its founding.
He is honest about how it began. "When I first took over," he says, "what carried me was a sense of responsibility to the family business." Duty, not passion.
Then something changed. "Walking the workshops with my father, listening to him tell of handing out catalogs one by one at exhibitions more than a decade ago — and seeing the notebook on his desk, dense with meeting notes — I gradually touched the deeper meaning of this work: a love that comes from deep in the heart, and a vision of the rise of China's dental industry. They were never far from me."
A Student Before a CEO
Spend a minute in George's office in the film and you notice the bookshelf: rows of worn volumes on management, incentive systems, organizational design. One book he quotes by name — *The Founder's Mentality*: "The founder's mentality isn't only what a young company needs to succeed. It matters just as much to a mature, steadily-running company."
That line defined his challenge. "When I joined in 2020, I could feel the foundation and depth of a company that had been running for fifteen years — and I could also see its settled side, the lack of breakthrough. How to let this mature company honor its inheritance while re-injecting the entrepreneurial spirit — that was the greatest challenge I faced."
His answer, over five years: reset the goals and vision, attract talent from beyond the dental industry, and set standards for how the work gets done.
The Million-Yuan Leap of Faith
The story that best captures how George thinks is the company's digital transformation — the same system behind the traceability every DentaSource client benefits from today.
"For a system investment of over a million per deployment, at first we hesitated," he admits. "Digitalization wasn't something we strictly needed in the short term — and there was no successful precedent in our industry to reference or copy. That meant the difficulties would be many."
"But carrying the entrepreneurial spirit and our original intention — to serve our customers better and to lift our management — we resolved to begin." A year and a half of iteration later: a paperless production floor, production data driving decisions in real time, and every key component and process step traceable — the "medical record" your ROSON chair carries from its build to your operatory.
"Quality control rose to a new height," he says simply. "Exactly the goal we set."
The Second Twenty Years
Ask George where all this is going and he doesn't talk about rankings. He talks about a vision with two sentences in it: "Clinics all over the world using high-value ROSON equipment — and ROSON's promise, helping dentists excel, taking root in people's hearts."
"These five years, we've let ROSON inherit its striving spirit while arming it with modern management methods," he says. "We are ready for the sprint into the next stage." And true to habit, that readiness looks like listening: this year alone he has sat with partners in Russia, Egypt, Europe — and with us in Manila — asking what dentists need, and carrying the answers back into the next generation of chairs.
Watch: His Story, In His Own Words
The segment below is from ROSON's twentieth-anniversary film — George's chapter first, followed by one of the product-team leaders he mentored, whose story of a failed first product and starting again says everything about the culture of self-renewal George built. (Mandarin with English subtitles.)
Why This Matters to Your Clinic
When you buy a chair, you're trusting the judgment of the people who made it — for the next decade. We work with ROSON exclusively because its leader reads the books, walks the production floor, bets on quality before it's convenient, and flies across the sea to listen to the clinics his equipment serves.