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April 2000 Issue the bulletin  The history
of Sun Hing Group reads like a plot for a best-selling novel: a 9-year-old boy leaves his
backwater village and travels to Hong Kong with his bundled belongings and a headful of
dreams. He arrives at a time when Bubonic plague is devastating the colony, but he gets
lucky and manages to evade its clutches. He studies hard and after school manages to start
up a little business. The entrepreneur hires four employees to help with the growing
company ?K . One hundred years
after leaving home, that 9-year-old boy??s dream is a multi-million-dollar empire and a household name in Hong Kong we
have come to know as the Sun Hing Group.
Sun Hung founder Lee Chi Hung (right) But this is not fiction; it ??s a true story about how the Hong Kong entrepreneurial spirit and a bit of luck can make dreams stretch as far as the imagination.In the early 1900s, Hong Kong was viewed as the land of opportunity. Lee Chi Hung was among the hundreds of thousands of migrants that flocked to the colony in its early days chasing a dream of starting up a successful business. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1900 at the tender age of 9. He ??d left his hometown of Tsui Mei, a small village near Macau, to join his father who ran a property business in the British colony.He was lucky enough to be accepted into Yuk Tsoi College, the forerunner of today ??s Queen??s College, and was one of the first Hong Kong Chinese to study in the school, said Sun Hing Group Chairman Simon Lee, Lee Chi Hung??s third son.
After his studies, Lee Chi Hung worked for the German Mail Line, today ??s Hapag-Lloyd, and later with a Japanese shipping line. But in the mid-1930s he decided to strike out on his own and founded a flour import and distribution company called Sun Chung Woo Hong.Right: Simon Lee The shipping knowledge he ??d learned from his previous jobs and business skills he??d picked up managing his own firm led to his appointment as the Chinese freight agent for the Danish-owned East Asiatic Company.The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in late 1942 forced Mr Lee to flee to Guangdong along with hundreds of thousands of other Chinese. But he didn ??t let the war get in the way of business and kept himself busy running a riverboat service with some friends between Ho Yuan and Weichow.Mr Lee returned to Hong Kong after the war in 1945 and established a small flour distribution company called Sun Hing Hong with a staff of four. Although the war was over, Hong Kong was still suffering from a shortage of food. The British administration retook control of the colony and asked merchants who were engaged in wholesaling flour before the war to apply to become distributors for consignments of relief flour that were on their way from Australia. Sun Hing Hong was among the 10 companies selected to distribute the flour. Within a year normal trade patterns were resumed and Sun Hing Hong ??s role in the emergency distribution of flour came to an end.The company began seeking other sources of business and Mr Lee took up his old role as East Asiatic Company ??s (EAC) Chinese freight agent in 1946.Little could Mr Lee have known at the time that the working relationship was to become the foundation of Sun Hing Hong ??s future success. In the late 1950s, EAC became the general agent for Gold Star Line, a newly-established subsidiary of the Haifa-based ZIM Israel Navigation Co. Ltd., and Sun Hing was later appointed as the Chinese freight agent for Gold Star Line.In December 1960, however, Gold Star and EAC parted ways. This left both Sun Hing and Gold Star in an awkward situation; Sun Hing was about to lose Gold Star ??s business, whilst Gold Star was about to lose both its general agent and its Chinese freight agent.Gold Star ??s founding Manager Paul Biro, had developed good relations with Mr Lee. Feeling Sun Hing was competent enough to handle its business he asked Mr Lee if he would become its Hong Kong general agent.The offer put Mr Lee in a difficult situation. If he accepted, he would have to part ways with AEC with which he had developed a close relationship over many years. At the time, ZIM and its subsidiaries were aggressively expanding their cargo services and had routes to Africa. Plans were also underway to complete a global network by inaugurating the new Pacific Star Line service the following year, which would link ports in the Far East with those in North America. After much heart-searching, Mr Lee decided in would be in the best interests of Sun
Hing to go with Gold Star and ZIM. In March 1961, Sun Hing was appointed the general agent
for the two lines, marking the first time a Chinese company had become the Hong Kong
general agent for a major international business on a commission basis. "They were appointed the general agent for ZIM Lines, but they did not use ZIM for political implications," Simon Lee said. "Because of the war with the Middle East, if you had any contact with Israel you were boycotted from the Arab world." Sun Hing soon added other agencies to its business; Five Star Line of former Burma, several Korean lines and one from the U.S. It was around this time that Hong Kong had developed into a manufacturing hub churning our cheap goods for export. This meant business for Sun Hing and other shipping agents was good, but it led to a shortage in warehouse space. In the mid-1960s Sun Hing diversified into warehousing, and leased a 6,000 square foot warehouse in Hunghom. The company ??s competitive rates attracted more business from its own shipping lines and other companies, leading it to expand its lease space to 30,000 square feet. In 1965 a separate company, Sun Hing Godown Limited, was established to concentrate on the warehousing business. Sun Hing's first godown at Cosmopolitan Dockyard, Hunghom, during the late 1960s.
"My father passed away in ??67, but even before he passed away I was the only one out of his three sons who helped in the business," he said.Simon Lee ??s brothers pursued their own careers; one became a medical doctor and the other an industrialist. Neither brother was interested in joining their brother so it was up to Simon Lee to continue the family business.He soon branched off into warehousing, freight forwarding, truckage and insurance. "All the businesses are interrelated with the shipping business, so everything complements the other," he said. "If a client wants to ship something to America, we can insure them. When cargo comes in we can store it and have the trucks to forward it." Sun Hing ??s warehousing business has declined slightly in recent years but the company remains one of the few main godown operators.Mr Lee has also expanded the company ??s business into mainland China. He said the reason it waited until 1995 before moving into China was because prior to 1992 China did not recognise Israel. But he has made up for lost time, having established a chain of 14 offices around the country.Sun Hing was passed to a third generation of Lees in the mid-1980s, after Simon Lee underwent surgery to remove his gall bladder. His eldest son, Philip, returned to Hong Kong from Vancouver to visit his father who was hospitalised for one month. Realising he was heading for retirement, Simon Lee and his wife hoped their son would consider taking over the family business. "My wife said, ??daddy is not getting any younger, his health is not very good. Please consider coming back to help??," Mr Lee said.For Philip Lee, the decision could not have been easy. He was a well-respected barrister in Vancouver, Canada, and had been practising law for over 10 years. His wife, too, had a rich career in North America. "So he and his wife came back. At the beginning I was a little worried I was being selfish to ask my son to abandon the legal profession, for which he had trained for so long, and come into a business which he knows nothing about. For the first two to three years I really had my worries," he said. To stimulate his interest in the company, Mr Lee said he would encourage his son to expand the business. "If a son comes in to a business on a small scale he quickly gets bored and wants to get out," he said. "So you must make it interesting for him; he must gradually enlarged the business and when he sees the growth this is a kind of encouragement for him." Philip Lee is now CEO of the company, while his father is chairman, acting as an advisor. But with 10 years practising law, and 13 years running the company, Simon Lee said his son ??s background makes him a talented businessman. Whether Philip Lee??s children will join the firm in the future is too early to say, Simon Lee said, but he added that he hopes so.Mr Lee attributes the success of Sun Hing Group, and any company or individual for that matter, to hard work, and trustworthiness. "There are the two things I strongly believe in life, whether you get rich or not is another thing -- sometimes it depends on luck -- but I think if one wants to be successful as one wants, firstly you must work hard and secondly you must be honest," he said. For the future, Mr Lee said Sun Hing is looking very hard into the logistics of its warehouses. "In fact, our partner Sun Hing Kai is coming to us for the delivery of goods for goods over the Net. Because we have the warehouses and trucks we can deliver. I think this is the future," he said. And so starts another chapter in the history of Sun Hing Group ?K .
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