Supply chain leader Li & Fung works hard at dealing with tragedy

"Nobody needs to die to do business," says Li & Fung chairman William Fung Kwok-lun. "When people die, that is the bottom line."

It's a fairly stark pronouncement in the early stages of an hour-long interview in the boardroom at the Hong Kong headquarters of the world's biggest supply chain management firm.

And it gets to that point quickly when Fung hears himself uttering the words "supply chain sustainability" and decides to make clear to any potential cynics in the room exactly what the phrase really means.

"That is a very mild term that doesn't convey the seriousness and human tragedy side of this whole thing - because we're talking about factory safety and worker safety and we're talking about worker deaths," Fung says.

Our conversation is taking place 48 hours after Li & Fung announced what it described as a corporate reorganisation to create a new vendor support services business unit that will ramp up its offering to the 15,000 factories it works with in a bid to improve their safety and efficiency.

Ultimately it is a response to the November 2012 blaze that killed 111 workers at the Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh, which was a supplier to Li & Fung.