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Raises himself up by bootstraps
http://www.sina.com.cn 2003/09/12 11:55  上海英文星报

  ORIGINALLY an impoverished farmer who was forced to drop out of high school but who is now the president of an enterprise with annual revenue of 60 million yuan (US.25 million), Shi Haiyun said lack of education had been the biggest obstacle on his way to success.

  Shi's company, the Zhejiang Zhiji Hongyn Socks Co, is based in his home county of Datang and Zhuji City, one of China's "Socks Towns".

  He is also back at his studies as a student doing a correspondence MBA course run by the Beijing-based Renmin University.

  "Back in high school, I didn't have the 168 yuan (US), which was an incredibly huge amount of money to me at that time, to continue my studies. I always felt it was a great pity for me - until now," Shi said.

  Humble start

  Because his father was categorized as a "rich farmer", who had to be criticized and re-educated during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), Shi, with his three sisters, spent his childhood in isolation and suffered discrimination.

  His father died when he was 13 and he had to give up schoolwork to support the family.

  In 1981, when he was 18 years old, Shi got to know a person working in one of the several State-owned knitting factories in town.

  The factories were on the verge of collapse but Shi learnt that they had contacts with some large socks-making factories in Shanghai.

  He also knew that the Shanghai factories threw away socks which contained flaws.

  Shi contacted workers in the Shanghai factories and bought the discarded socks at 1 yuan (US/data0/apache/share/cgi-bin/publish/doc_add.pl.12) for 1 kilogram.

  Those socks were the primary materials he had to begin operations in his workshop, where he had two manual knitting machines.

  He had to tear open the socks first and chose the useful threads.

  "I borrowed 272 yuan (US) from one of my relatives to buy the two machines," Shi said.

  One of his sisters was in charge of the two machines and knitting work, while Shi spent hours in preparing the materials and selling them to vendors from nearby Yiwu County which has one of the largest wholesale market in China for daily necessities.

  "I also learnt some knitting skills from a worker in the state-owned factory," he said.

  Usually, a 14-hour workday could produce 60 pairs of socks.

  Shi had to go out on the streets in the town very early in the morning to sell the socks to neighbouring vendors.

  "I did it secretly to escape from the police or officials in the Industrial and Commercial department," he said.

  Each pair of the socks was sold at about 0.8 yuan and Shi made 0.2 yuan on each sale.

  He said the quality of the socks he made at that time was bad compared with those produced by the automated machines in his factory now.

  He managed almost every aspect of manufacture in his workshop.

  He couldn't sleep on the occasions when his machines broke down.

  "All the young people in our village went to see the movies at night, while I was staring at my machines and wondering how I was going to mend them," Shi said.

  The workshop brought in several hundred yuan every year.

  Stiff competition

  Shi finally decided to give up the workshop in 1985 and he rode on the tractor to Yiwu to set up his own small stand in the wholesale market.

  After 10 years of hard work, he returned to Datang, and outlayed 2 million yuan (US,545) to purchase 10 machines and 0.2 hectare land for his new socks-making company.

  Now he is the president of the company with 200 employees and he doesn't have to carry out the jack-of-all-trades role he had in the workshop decades ago.

  However, he is worried about the stiff competition from his competitors in the small town.

  "The competition sometimes is too bloody and unfair," Shi said. "For the socks, you can make them very good so they will last for years and you can also cheat the customers by making low-quality ones but which have a good look. We always have to confront those tricky competitors."

  Shi believes that quality and honesty were the key points leading to his success.

  His socks were first sold to Yiwu and now 80 per cent of them are exported to Europe, Japan, the Middle East and Russia.

  Walmart and K-mart are two largest clients of his factory.

  Shi was excited when he first signed a deal with foreign clients but, at first he had some problems.

  Foreign clients

  "The foreign clients were too strict and I couldn't stand it at first," he said.

  Because of language problems, the workers sometimes put a pair of orange socks into a package which should have contained a blue pair.

  "I stopped co-operation with foreign buyers for six months and I thought I should give my staff some training and then set out to win the foreign businessmen back," he said.

  In his business, he has insisted on not employing his relatives even his wife and they have complained about this policy a lot.

  But relatives working there or not, his factory produces 30 million pairs of socks every year for Walmart and K-mart and it has become one of the two largest private-owned enterprises in the town.




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