Mr Alvera' attributes his success to an open mind and a willingness to think outside the box.

A keen sailor, Mr Alvera' arrived in Hong Kong in 1994 after skippering a friend's yacht to the colony from Italy. He says he is an accidental arrival, but now describes Hong Kong as his land of opportunity.

'They say the United States is the land of opportunity but I think Hong Kong is the land of opportunity - at least it has been for me,' he says.

'It was quite an adventure sailing here and when I arrived, my friend asked me to help with his company. The moment I first started working here, I fell in love with it.'

After working for the trading company for a few years, Mr Alvera' says he began to see the writing on the wall: that Hong Kong was being bypassed by clients who were buying directly from China.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis accelerated the problem, while Hong Kong has also become a part of China, he says.

'I could see it coming as the fundamentals were wrong - Hong Kong's success couldn't last forever and I asked myself where can I go from here, what can I do that is different?'

He quit the trading company and went to Australia for a year, where he worked for Colour Corp, a printing company which had an offshoot based on innovative ideas.

After returning to Hong Kong brimming with business ideas, Mr Alvera' started Marco-Paolo and has not looked back.

The company's new generation bar mat - made with a rubber backing instead of the traditional towel model which normally adorns a bar - is selling like hot cakes, he says.

According to Mr Alvera', 60 per cent of people who go into a pub do not know what brand of beer they are going to drink. His bar mats are mini ads for beer brands and help the customer decide their beer, a feature the brewers love.

'This advertising model was very useful to increase sales and everybody wants it now,' Mr Alvera' says.

'We even had to increase capacity.'

The factory, based in Guangdong, employs 200 workers and makes 30,000 bar mats a month on daily eight-hour shifts. The company has just added a second shift to help with production, and next month will add another to meet the rising demand.

Two people, plus secretaries, work in the company's Hong Kong Central office, while a number of others work around the world selling the product.

Beer brewers in Britain, Ireland, Belgium and Australia are clamouring for the bar mats. The company is also negotiating contracts in the Netherlands and Germany, and is eyeing China and Japan, while the US is also on the horizon.

'We needed to do something different,' Mr Alvera' says.

'So we added value to our product and in China they don't do that. We improved design, technology and service.

'If you can add these three things to a product, you can make money. This is my concept: try and find a product that has a market and add value to it.'

The product is only now starting to make money despite being developed 18 months ago. Italian-born Mr Alvera' knew he would have to wait for the profits to start rolling in and was confident his product would take off, but he also realised he could not rest on his laurels.

'We anticipated that this bonanza wouldn't last forever, that sooner or later somebody else would start producing the product in China,' he says.

'Now we are in the process of creating a third-generation mat and it will be patented so nobody else will be able to sell it, giving us 18 years of exclusivity.

'The reason for my success is that I looked at the fundamentals and they were really very simple.

'In 1997, people were getting rich on things that were unsustainable, such as real estate. I kept asking, 'what can the Hong Kong economy sustain' and the only thing left was manufacturing in China with added value.'

Mr Alvera' says there is hope for Hong Kong, although he believes it will have to reinvent itself to turn its fortunes around, that it must stop relying on past successes, such as hoping for another property boom.

'I love Hong Kong and I hope it makes it. I have a lot of hope in the young who are just starting out now. They must look forward, but it doesn't mean leaving the past completely behind,' he says.

'And you must have fun.'