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Mark Graham

Designer Simon Ma speaks rapidly, acts decisively and thinks globally.

Since arriving in Shanghai about seven years ago, Mr Ma has turned around the fortunes of his family's interior contracting firm in Shanghai, founded a successful design company of his own, and even had time left over to create a charity to train young artists.

The 33-year-old from Hong Kong is imbued with boundless confidence and ambition and a vision  grounded in SAR-style pragmatism.

The results speak for themselves. When Mr Ma took over the family contracting firm CTL, it had only a handful of employees and contracts in Shanghai; now it boasts more than 100 people on the payroll and does projects for corporate clients such as Nike, Dragonair, Federal Express and L'Oreal.

For more unusual   projects, he founded Ma Design, gave it the quirky acronym Mad and watched business grow so rapidly  that the staff list there is also approaching 100.

And just as his company shows promise, so does the city around it.

'Shanghai is a special place,' he says. 'It is cosmopolitan, and people like new things. You can do more interesting things here. I think in 10 years it will be another Manhattan.'

The Ma mini-empire is run from his recently leased 6,000 sq ft offices in the up-and-coming Suzhou Creek neighbourhood.  Designers beaver away at CTL's and Mad's myriad projects, usually  priced  between US$1 million and US$5 million, urged on by their  boss.

'For me, this is a very good place to  raise myself to  world-class level, a stepping-stone to do more work internationally,' said Mr Ma, who  studied architecture at University College, London. 'In Shanghai, design people are very good technically, and hard working, but not so good at creative thinking.'

Mr Ma's current flagship projects are a Shanghai boutique hotel called King's Court and  a HK$200 million project to renovate and revitalise Tongli, one of the water towns on the outskirts of the city.

Mr Ma knows from experience how circumstance can mean the difference between poverty and wealth. He grew up in humble surroundings - his early years were spent in a 400 sq ft  flat - but business successes by his father, Ma Hing-fung, eventually allowed  him to  go to boarding school in England.

The way Simon Ma tells it, he fared miserably academically, flourishing only when allowed to move in a more creative direction. After gradating from university in 1997, he was summoned to help with the family business, charged with the seemingly thankless task of revitalising the floundering Shanghai branch.

'I think there were only four people working there at the time,' he says. 'It grew and grew.  What I did was offer total solutions so people could get contracting and design services from the same company.'

The Mad design business took that concept further still, covering every detail of building and interior design  including   a 300-strong range of seats and sofas, chairs and tables priced from US$3,000 up to US$90,000. Movie star Jackie Chan is the owner of a US$35,000 armchair.

For all the rapid expansion, Mr Ma is only too aware of the flaws in the Shanghai business model, plagued  by an  unwieldy bureaucracy, opaque laws and residents nowhere nearly as cosmopolitan as in  Hong Kong.

Staff, though, can be hired for half the price, and building-rental costs are similarly lower. A handful of Mr Ma's key executives are from Hong Kong, with the rest of the workforce divided  between Shanghainese and people from throughout China.

'You can do interesting business in Shanghai, especially if you have something that is new,' he said. 'I think you have to have good capital for the market to become mature, and then you will make a hell of a lot of money.'

He is  a fixture at the classiest social gatherings in the party-loving city. But money from his at-home painting goes into a charity project aimed at helping hardscrabble youngsters  in Guizhou , one of the nation's most backward provinces. He paid  US$160,000 to build, equip and staff a school for budding child artists, offering them an escape from their bleak peasant lives.

Whatever he does, whether with perpetual motion at work or the art he does at home, it is usually at breakneck speed.

'I am a fast designer, and people like my speed; all I need is yellow paper and one pen,' he said. 'Hong Kong is very fast, and I think growing up there and my education in England means I am part of both east and west.'



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