Making connections: His family soya sauce business grew after Wong took over from his father in 2006 and started selling online.
WHY are so few Chinese new village enterprises selling online?
Adrian Wong Chee Yun cut short a fledging sales career in Kuala Lumpur and returned to Bentong, Pahang, to run his family’s Cap Tangan soy sauce business in 2006.
The Cap Tangan brand sold under Kichap Bentong Sdn Bhd was started in 1980 by his father Wong Yin and sold mostly in the vicinity of Bentong, Raub and Klang Valley folk visiting the small town.
Today after a slew of digital business transformation help from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Cap Tangan has grown from generating RM2mil in revenue in 2017 before tax to an expected RM4mil this year.
Eventually, the brand was featured at the visitor centre of e-commerce giant Alibaba in Hangzhou in Jan this year, as a testament to the company’s success at venturing into online sales.
Wong, who holds a food processing and bakery diploma, attributes part of their success to the sauce’s rich Japanese-Kokumi concoction that gives a winning blend of umami and rich-tasting sweetness.
The other part is getting on board e-commerce via UTAR’s New Village E-commerce Project (UNVEP), which was started in 2017 to help the digital migration of Chinese New Village enterprises like Kichap Bentong Sdn Bhd to global platforms like Lazada and Shopee.
However, eight years later, very few businesses in Malaysia’s 627 Chinese new villages have reached the kind of online success enjoyed by Cap Tangan, despite resources made available by institutions like UTAR.
Wong briefing UTAR students on how Kichap Bentong is operated at their factory in Bentong, Pahang.
Most small and medium enterprises in the 627 villages continue to serve customers in the confines of their villages or suburban neighbours.
Commercial successes like Adrian’s family business located in a Chinese New Village are still scarce, says UTAR Deputy Head of Unovate Prof Winnie Wong Whee Yen.
Dr Wong who has led the project since 2016 points to Wong’s willingness to embrace suggestions to improve his business that allows it to go online.
“Mr Adrian is very positive and committed to digital transformation,” she tells Sunday Star.
Under the project, a slew of faculties under the university offer their expertise ranging from improving business processes, marketing, sales, and how to do business on e-commerce platforms and gaining traction on social media.
In return, students are given the opportunity to work with product owners who choose to undergo digital transformation. They seek out businesses with products that have the potential to go global and conduct further market research.
Students will help the businesses set up social media and e-commerce platform accounts and the subsequent listing of their products, handling the webstore, and pushing sales.
“Most importantly, practical learning exposes students to digital transformation learning,” Dr Wong says.
Launched on Nov 23, 2017, at the university’s Sungai Long campus by MCA President Datuk Seri Dr Wee Ka Siong, UNVEP seeks to help SMEs and SMIs promote their local and food products through e-commerce platforms such as Shopee and Lazada.
Through this programme, new villages are meant to adopt the latest and emerging digital technologies to improve their businesses. Presently, the programme has covered villages in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Perak, Pahang, and Negeri Sembilan
But UTAR says the take-up rate of the project has not been encouraging as only a total of 13 SMEs have been successfully coached and sell their products online to wider global markets out of hundreds of villages in those states. Across Malaysia, there are currently 627 Chinese new villages, according to the Housing and Local Government Ministry.
“The digital transformation and digital commerce awareness is not encouraging,” says Dr Wong, adding that there is a general resistance to change.
Wong: There is a general resistance to change and digitalisation among Chinese new villages to going the e-commerce way.
Datuk Chris Lee Ching Yong, who heads a committee overseeing Chinese new village matters for MCA, lays out several reasons for the slow rate at which New Village businesses enter the global e-commerce platforms.
“Any small industry in the new villages, whether they are operating from home or small workshops, already have their existing connections, with consistent buyers and probably long-time suppliers,” he says.
Lee suggests small businesses in Chinese new villages need permanent centres offering advice and help in digital transformation.
Most of the operators he says are not of a generation that is familiar with using social media or modern information technology.
“Asking them to use Lazada and Shopee, to manage the online interface, would be too complicated,” he says.
A possibility is to employ young educated workers savvy in the use of social media to promote their products.
“But maintaining this online presence must be a permanent job,” he points out.
What small businesses need, he says, is a fixed service centre in the village that provides on-call services to help with digitalisation.
“If it is something part-time or done as a project, it won’t help the business,” Lee says. “If they need help, who would they look to and who would do the follow up?”
Small and Medium Enterprises Association of Malaysia (Samenta) national president Datuk William Ng says key issues include complacency among existing businesses and a need to have a mindset shift.
“First of all, we are fighting against complacency. Not every small business wants to or, for that matter, needs to grow larger. Secondly, going digital requires more of a mindset shift than capability building.”
Lee also agrees that there were business owners who may be trapped in the belief that their products were inferior on a global context.
“They are not so confident with their products. They have the thinking that their products cannot sell worldwide,” he says. “If they sell it locally, and someone buys it, that is good enough.”
