Mr Zhan is chairman and chief executive of Zoomlion, a construction equipment maker that led a €271m deal for Italian machinery maker Compagnia Italiana Forme Acciaio (Cifa) along with with consortium partners Goldman Sachs, Sino-Italian fund Mandarin Capital Partners and Hony Capital, a Chinese private equity firm. Completed in September, the transaction ranks as China Inc's second largest European buy-out and made Zoomlion the world's biggest manufacturer of concrete machinery.

Mr Zhan now works closely with Mr Ferrari, his counterpart at Cifa. That is no easy task when the two men do not share a common language.

Language can be an issue in all cross-border mergers. Chinese companies, knowing how daunting Mandarin can seem to foreigners, increasingly hire senior executives who have studied abroad in order to accommodate their overseas partners.