Sa Sa International celebrates its 30th anniversary this coming March and Simon Kwok Siu-ming, chairman and chief executive of the largest cosmetics retail chain in Asia, explained how far the company had come since it started from a 4 foot by 10 foot counter.
'My wife and I paid an acquisition fee of HK$20,000,' Mr Kwok said, 'and we started building the company from there.' This was in 1978, when all Japanese cosmetic products were sold from pharmacies and Mr Kwok's wife, Eleanor Kwok Law Kwai-chung, had left her previous job in the hopes of establishing an outlet for cosmetics.
Mr Kwok decided to help her in this endeavour and the couple formed their own business team, with Mrs Kwok responsible for purchasing, while Mr Kwok handled the sales. 'The turnover on that first day was just a little over HK$30,' Mr Kwok recalled. 'The rent was HK$1,000 a month.'
Today, Sa Sa generates an annual turnover of HK$2.9billion. The cosmetics chain now stocks tens of thousands of perfumes, skincare and other cosmetic products.
With the company's enormous success, it is no wonder that Mr Kwok has won the Owner-Operator Award at this year's DHL/SCMP Hong Kong Business Awards. The nomination criteria specifically states that, among other skills and attributes, the nominee must have 'demonstrated the ability to take calculated risks' and, over the past 30 years, Mr Kwok has certainly proved himself to be capable of venturing into uncharted territory.
'With risk comes opportunity,' he said, when asked about the reasons behind his corporate decisions during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the 2003 Sars epidemic. Businesses suffered during the financial crisis and when tourism was badly hit because of Sars.