Over the past 14 years, the DHL/SCMP Hong Kong Business Awards have recognised excellence under the categories Business Person of the Year, Executive Award, Owner-Operator Award, Young Entrepreneur Award, International Award and Enterprise Award. Ahead of the presentation for this year's winners on December 2, every Monday we will speak to one of last year's winners and see how each has fared in the past 12 months.
Clothing firm Luen Thai Holdings has transformed its operations to get garments from designers' drawing boards to clothing racks faster as the industry becomes ever more competitive and trade barriers continue to fall.
The firm - winner of last year's Owner-Operator Award - began to specialise in the manufacture of shirts in the early 1980s. But in the late 1990s, it began planning for next year when nearly all global garment quotas will be scrapped.
Executives decided their firm would have to grow and offer more services to their customers ahead of the new environment.
'Quotas become a competitive advantage for those who have quotas,' executive vice-president Raymond Tan Cho-lung says. 'It is not about how well you manage your company but whether you have a quota to do business or not.
'The advantage for us is that we were under the quota protection for many years, so we have had time to prepare for the quota-free environment. If you are a newcomer, then you can only start from January 1, 2005, or you have to start from a very small scale before then.'