Manufacturing hat-trick

Pauline Ngan Po-ling, deputy chairman and managing director of Hong Kong-listed Mainland Headwear, has stepped up to deal with yet another challenge in her decades-long career as an entrepreneur.

When the rags-to-riches hat maker found that the wages and operating costs of her Shenzhen factories were rising too fast, she moved part of her business to a factory in Bangladesh in March to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs there.

But last week she fell victim to a call for a nationwide strike by textile workers after the collapse of a garment factory outside the country's capital city of Dhaka, which killed more than 1,000 workers.

The strike temporarily shut down her factory, and though production resumed this week, Ngan said the worry of political uncertainty remained.

Nonetheless, the company is still looking to move 30 per cent of its total production capacity from mainland China to Bangladesh by the middle of next year. Besides the attraction of low wages, she said, imports from Bangladesh enjoyed an exemption from duties in Europe.

Ngan, the third daughter of a Fujian family of six children, came to Hong Kong in the 1980s. The family flourished and all six children went on to establish their own businesses.

Ngan and her husband Ngan Hei-keung set up a label printing business in 1984, which later expanded into cap and hat making and led them to open their first factory in Shenzhen in 1992.