The Alumni Donor Stories is a regular series that explores a Bizad alumni’s giving journey. Tan Wang Cheow (BAC 1981) shares his story.
Q: Tell us more about yourself and your background
I graduated from NUS in 1981 with a B. Acc degree. I joined Arthur Young upon graduation for a year and decided after that I needed to pick up some marketing skills. So, I joined Business Computers, distributor for NEC minicomputers, for one year. During this period, I realised that microcomputers were getting popular and decided to form a computer reseller company to take on NEC and Fujitsu dealership for microcomputers. Over the next couple of years, we started assembling IBM compatible computers, and we were then exporting to Eastern Europe and particularly to Poland and Hungary. On a trip to Warsaw, I realised that the containers of computers and peripherals shipped over were not entirely for Poland but were shipped across to Russia.
Thus I began our journey eastwards to Moscow. We started trading computers, home consumers electronics, peripherals, communication devices and eventually moved into food and beverage products. We started in Moscow, moved out to the outlying cities, and the Commonwealth Independent States after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We decided to kickstart our range of brands, starting with MacCoffee in 1994. In the beginning, we were struggling to sell one to two 20-feet containers of 3-in-1 coffee a month. Never did we imagine then that today, we can be selling more than 8,000 containers a year. Today, as a global food and beverage company, we produce and serve more than seven billion servings of coffee worldwide. We listed in the year 2000 on the Singapore Stock Exchange mainboard.
As a child, I have always followed my father on his marketing trips in selling textiles and watching him do his sales pitch. He inspired me to do my own business. I have always been a dreamer all my life. I dreamt of running a travel agency, a tuition centre, a photography studio, a garment boutique, etc. In school, I competed with the school book store in selling school textbooks to the students. I delivered the books to students at a discount and earned the difference by ordering direct from the publisher. I also remembered competing with the school in offering class coloured photographs against the traditional black and white ones in 1974. I just needed a 35 mm camera and a roll of films. I wouldn’t have done this without my classmates’ help in helping me with taking the orders.
