A former soldier in the Kuomintang is expanding his logistics empire into the mainland market
'They shelled us on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. We expected war any day. Our duty was to fight the Communist army. We lived in a tunnel under a mountain and it was complete darkness after seven in the evening. We sat in our emplacements with machine guns at the ready.'
It is 1972 and Su Lung-te is a platoon leader in the Kuomintang army on the island of Jinmen, a few hundred metres off the coast of Fujian. It was the front line in the war between the Communists and the Nationalists, who returned fire with shelling on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Now, 31 years later, Mr Su heads the biggest logistics company in Taiwan, Ones Logistics, which signed a contract on Sunday to establish its mainland headquarters in Shanghai. The firm is opening operations in Shanghai as well as Guangzhou, with investment this year of US$5 million.
'If someone had told me in Jinmen that I would one day establish a company in Shanghai, I would have said it was impossible,' Mr Su said in an interview yesterday. 'We were ready for war.'
He has been coming to the mainland since 1995 but decided that only now were conditions right for him to set up a company here, with the aim of establishing a nationwide logistics network to serve domestic, foreign and Taiwan companies. For him, the investment and regulatory climate and critical mass of clients are good enough to try to repeat here what he has done in Taiwan.
