Entrepreneur turns small ideas into profitable ventures
Managers and business leaders often conjure up a grand vision and talk in terms of globalisation, worldwide networks and fantastical rates of growth, and then try to dream up a strategic plan to make it all come true.
Daniel M. Cheng, in contrast, starts with a small idea. To that, he adds ingenuity, pragmatism and hard work, and then lets the power of multiplication take over. For the managing director of Dunwell Enviro-Tech (Holdings), the formula has proved successful numerous times over the past 25 years.
It is now allowing him to develop new ventures, find profitable uses in different industries for the latest engineering technology, and contribute in practical ways to preserving the environment.
Mr Cheng first struck gold in the mid-1980s. In far from ideal circumstances, with interest rates high and the stock market jittery, he took on a 2,000 sqft family-owned factory in a Mong Kok industrial building. Eschewing potentially grander projects, he focused on producing three small stainless steel components used to guide the tape in video cassettes. Soon, the company was supplying not just all the brand-name cassette manufacturers, but also the duplicators of movies, and had become the world's largest supplier of those particular components.
After the installation of high-tech stamping and polishing machines, production hit 100 million parts a month, attracting visits from overseas manufacturing engineers amazed at the output and efficiency.
