Entrepreneurs share their success secrets
Liu Qiongying's capacity for hard work and entrepreneurialism was evident at a young age. As a child, she helped her mother look after the family farm in Sichuan province by carting well water, and when she was still in her mid-teens, Ms Liu marshalled the cash and resources to open her own shoe shop.
Today she stands at the helm of Aiminger Leather Goods Manufacturing in Chengdu, which at last count had three shoemaking factories and more than 3,000 employees.
Ms Liu's rags-to-riches story is one of many instructive examples of the business self-starter who emerged in China in the last 30 years of economic reform.
In their book Made in China - Secrets of China's Dynamic Entrepreneurs, Winter Nie and Katherine Xin detail just what makes this breed of businessmen tick as well as the strategies they employed to stake their claim to success in their industries. The authors interviewed 20 people who started without special financial or family advantages, whose private enterprises had been operating for at least five years and were largely flying under the media radar.
The entrepreneurs fell broadly into four categories - grassroots, experts, government officials and professional managers - but all had the ability to adapt quickly and take risks. They also tended to start at the low end of the value chain before working their way up, using the guerilla tactic of making an impact in the countryside before making a push into the city.
With banks largely unreceptive to private businesspeople, most of the entrepreneurs in the book raised their initial capital by borrowing from friends and relatives and made their first substantial profits by capitalising on a golden opportunity or on links with a big industry player.
Cao Xianglai of Hainan Zhongxin Chemical, for example, used the name and contacts he built up while working for China National Chemical Construction Corp to go out on his own and run a subsidiary of the firm on a contract basis.
Some of the entrepreneurs adopted business models such as vertical integration and niche marketing that would be familiar to people in other parts of the world, but there were also approaches more particular to the mainland because of state regulation.
Tianjin Longtaixiang Metal Products chief Song Qiang, for example, found it essential to expand and consolidate his broad network of contacts with customs officials to make a real go of his scrap metal import business.
Today, many of the businesses are in transition and their leaders are struggling to find the personnel and funding to make the next step.
Made In China is a well-researched and well-told examination of the drives and thinking behind some of the mainland's individual business success stories. The featured entrepreneurs represent the kinds of operators multinationals are increasingly finding themselves in partnership and rivalry with in the mainland marketplace.
Perhaps, as the authors suggest, a better understanding of the people behind the mainland's privately owned enterprises could have helped offshore players like French food giant Danone avoid the litigation and losses of some of their local tie-ups.
