Cheng Yum Kwai

Cheng Yum Kwai was born in 1947 in Xiamen. A townsman of Amoy’s managing director, Wong TukSau,Cheng Yum Kwai’s father had once worked as a plasterer for the Huang family. In 1947, father followed Wong TukSau to Hong Kong becoming a plaster technician in Amoy’s building department. There he supervised the construction of the Green Spot Building until retiring in 1975. Cheng Yum Kwai came to Hong Kong and reunited with his father in 1948. The whole family subsequently lived in a village house in Ngau Tau Kokprovided by Amoy. Immediately adjacent to their home were the homes of three other Amoy employees and their families, all of them originally from Xiamen. Many of Cheng Yum Kwai’s immediate family members eventually workedfor Amoy. In addition to his mother who peeled lychees in the pickle room, theinclude company employed his eldest sister workingin the canning division, and his third eldest sister workingin the Green Spot plant for a short period. Amoy also found work for Cheng Yum Kwai’s younger brother to do a summer job, and his elder brother initially repairing carsand then drivingthe company’s trucksfor the paper factory until 1986.

Cheng Yum Kwai studied at the Amoy Workers’ Children School for primary education. Standing alone on a hill in Ngau Chi Wan, the Amoy-affiliated school had more than 20 students across all grades. As allpupilswerechildren of Amoy workers, tuition was free. The school was staffed by two female teachers from Xiamen who taught three subjects to the lower grades – Chinese language, social studies and mathematics. Teaching of the English language only began in the fifth grade.  Having completed Primary Five, Cheng Yum Kwai transferred to Bethel High School at Kowloon City. While at primary school, Cheng Yum Kwai had participated in activities of the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association of Hong Kong. His achievements there included receiving a mouthwash cup during a ceremony to celebrate the Queen’s coronation.

After finishing primary school, Cheng Yum Kwai enrolled in Bethel High School for his secondary studies. As he was poor in English language, he found it difficult to keep up with the schoolwork. As his family could not afford to hire a private tutor, Cheng Yum Kwai finally dropped out of school in Form Four. He subsequently went to Amoy to start a summer job, tidying up the Green Spot soda bottles and removing used bottle straws. The following year, he became a permanent employee, working as a clerk in the general affairs department. As his father had already worked with Amoy for many years, Cheng Yum Kwai’s transfer to a permanent position required no real formal procedures.

After he obtained his driver’s licence in 1967, Cheng Yum Kwai took charge of managing Amoy’s general affairs department drivers. He then served as a foreman in the company’s machinery department from 1969. As he was not a car repair apprentice, Cheng Yum Kwai’s duties in the machinery department involved supervising maintenance, welding, spraying and installation work on plant vehicles by allocating jobs to different technicians. At that time, Amoy’s machinery department and paper factory had already hired many technicians from Guangdong, while the soy sauce division was the only section remaining to hirea good number of workers with Xiamen origin. In 1975, Cheng Yum Kwai was appointed head of the company’s warehouse and began managing raw materials and products. After Amoy was acquired by the Hang Lung Group, he was transferred back to the machinery department where he took responsibility for vehicle maintenance and also oversaw the electrical, engine and woodwork rooms. When the company set up its frozen dim sum business in 1982, Cheng Yum Kwai became warehouse and transportation manager.

In 1972, the Sime Darby Group acquired Amoy following a share exchange. Initially, Sime Darby had an equal amount of equity asthe Huang and Cheng families did, but gradually Simebought up Amoy’s shares on the stock market. By the time it sold its shares to Hang Lung, Sime Darby already held a 60% equity. After acquiring its stake in Amoy, Sime Darby did not make changes toAmoy’s business and employed the same group of staff from the previous owner. The major change was to introduce a managing director as well aspersonnel and accounting managers to oversee the changes in Amoy’s administrative and personnel systems. At this time, Wong TukSau became a deputy director, beginning to withdraw gradually from the company’s daily operation while Cheng Ching Fun remained in the company with the title general manager.

After taking over Amoy, Sime Darby commissioned consultants to review the salary levelsof all supervisory and managerial staff. As a result of this appraisal, Cheng Yum Kwai was awarded a 10-20% salary increase. In the early days, Amoy did not have a well-definedemployee remuneration system and had not yet set up a master pay scale. As a result, wage differentials in the same job position wasnot uncommon. Sime Darby reformed the company’s remuneration system, paying bonuses based onprofits and salary levels. In the past, bonuses were given to employees as gratuities after individual staff members were appraised by their boss. In the early days, Amoy’s personnel matters were handled by the general affairs department and if an applicant was introduced by an acquaintance, no job interviewswerenecessary. From 1972 onwards, manpower matters were overseen by a dedicated personnel manager and there were systems for recruitment and salary levels. As a result, newcomers needed to fill in forms and had to undergo job interviews before they could be hired.

In 1977, the Hang Lung Group bought Sime Darby's Amoy shares and subsequently carried out property development projects in Amoy Industrial Estate. At this time, Amoy bought the South Sea textile millwhich had already ceased operation, and movedmost of its operations from Ngau Tau Kok to South Sea in 9½ Milestone in Tsuen Wan. Amoy’s soy sauce division and paper factory were the first to gofollowed by the sauce division. The productionof soy sauce required a large pieceof land, and the former South Sea textile millhad all the space needed. At this point, Amoy began using huge plasticvats to sun-dry soybeans. This was a radical change from the previous practice of building sun-drying tanks. At the same time, the company installed new machinery for production. As Amoy staff quarters were still in Ngau Tau Kok, the company had to use shuttle buses to sendstaff to and from the new plant. Some employees were reluctant to work in Tsuen Wan and Amoy made them redundant and compensated them according to local labour legislations.

When the US-owned food company Pillsbury acquired Amoy’s shares in 1984, Cheng Yum Kwai had become the company’s personnel manager. By then, Amoy had undergone major personnel changes including a move from an employee pension scheme to a provident fund. Under the provident fund, both Amoy and its employees each contributed 5% of each month’s salary during the first six years of employment, while Amoy paid 7.5% from the seventh year and 10% from the twelfth year of employment onwards. The Hang Lung Group and Pillsbury co-operated in property development and took back three blocks of staff quarters. This caused real discontent among workers living there to the point that in 1985, both the employees and their employer squared off in court.

The three blocks of staff quarters concerned were called the “Amoy Staff Welfare Building” and were located in what is now the Phase Four of Amoy Gardens. The original site of Amoy’s staff quarters was located within Amoy Industrial Estate. This complex was demolished to make way for the Green Spot plant and Amoy Administration Building. The new Amoy Staff Welfare Building was reconstructed outside the plant. Block One of the Building was built in the 1960s and comprised eight storeys with ten units to each floor. The eighth floor was a single men’s dormitory with the larger rooms accommodating eight workers in four bunk beds and the smaller rooms being home to six employees in three bunk beds. The single men’s dormitory was free of charge and lights would be turned off by 11:00pm everyevening. The ground to seventh floor of the Building consisted of family apartments for employees and their families, with kitchen and toilet inside each unit. The monthly rent for the larger of the family quarterunits was $100 while the smaller units cost $70. Later, three large units on the ground floor were converted intoa clinic and a nursery, and all staff and their families could visit the clinic free of charge for consultations. Block Two and Block Three were all family quarters of six storeys each with two flats oneach floor or a total of 12 units in oneblock. At first, Cheng Yum Kwai resided on the eighth floor of Block One, and then moved into a large family unit after marriage paying a rent accounting for approximately 10% of his monthly income. As rentals for staff quarters were not cheap, there were often vacant units. Many residents at this time were Green Spot salesmen, some of them receiving lucrative commissions whichmade it easy for them to afford the comparatively high rentals. Cheng Yum Kwai recalled that life at the staff quarters was harmonious and that employees of different origins were well acquainted with one another as each block had its own Welfare Committee. Because the staff quarters carried the name “Staff Welfare”, litigation resulted when Hang Lung tried to demolish the site in 1985 as employees living in the family units were dissatisfied with the compensation offered. Cheng Yum Kwai served as the intermediary between the employer and employees in this incident and began to discover that being a competent personnel manager was not easy! Both parties finally reached a settlement when Amoy eventually conceded and raised tenants’ compensation.

After this lawsuit, Cheng Yum Kwai requested that he be transferred from the personnel department. He was subsequently assigned to the Tsuen Wan plant. There, he served as administrative manager and was responsible for three divisions, namely pickling, bottling and soy sauce. When Amoy moved to Tai Po Industrial Estate in 1987, Cheng Yum Kwai was put in charge of managing sauce production. In 1989, he also started to oversee Amoy’s soy sauce business. In 2004, Cheng Yum Kwai became head of the engineering department, a post he remains withonthe day of this interview.

When U.S. company Pillsbury acquired part of Amoy’s shareholding from Hang Lung Group in 1984, it changed the employees’ pension scheme to a provident fund. It also began selling off the Ngau Tau Kok plant to property developers in stages. At that time, Phase One of Amoy Gardens had already been completed and Amoy set up an additional security team ran by the personnel department to handle patrol duties. Pillsbury’s acquisition of Amoy’s shares had little impact on employees’ sense of loyalty. The only solidchangewas the setting up of a new plant in Tsuen Wan, resulting thatstaff hadto take factory shuttle buses to work. That said, the Tsuen Wan plant opened a staff canteen.

In 1991, the French BSN Group (formerly the Danone Group) acquired Amoy’s food business and assigned three French nationals as its managing director, personnel and marketing managers but leaving the production lines and employee benefits essentially unchanged. BSN was a diversified food company and its many businesses included Jacob’s biscuits, beers, glass bottles and cheeses. In 2006, Japanese company Ajinomoto Co. Inc. took over Amoy’s food business and sent four Japanese nationals to Hong Kong. Two of these staff subsequently took charge of Amoy’s research and development department (frozen food, soy sauce and sauce) while the remaining two served as deputy dim sum plant manager and company’s managing director. While Amoy’s products and production processes remained largely unchanged, specialists were occasionally sent from Japan Head Office to Hong Kong to give expert advice.

For decades, there were very few changes in the methods Amoy used to produce soy sauce aside from the advances in the fermentation process. In the past, Amoy used to hold roughly an inch deep of soybeans in bamboo sievesin the fermentation room, and thenadded mold species intoeach sieve to facilitate soybean fermentation. After the beans had fermented for three days, they were removed from the sieves. During the fermentation process, many soybeans became stuck to the bamboo of the sieves making cleaning very difficult. As the optimal temperature for soybean fermentation was 30 degrees Celsius, heaters needed to be placed in the fermentation room during the colder winter months. Nowadays, soybeans are contained in 8-inch tall yeast boxes for fermentation. As each box has a stainless steel perforated plate at its bottom, cleaning is very easy. Modern yeast boxes are also equipped with air circulationand thermostat functions which significantly reduce fermentation times and manpower requirements.

As Cheng Yum Kwai knew that Amoy’s production methods back then were similar to those used by its competitors, he felt the only way Amoy could distinguish its products was through the mold species it used. The fact that Amoy had its own mold species meant experts in the soy sauce trade could quickly recognise the flavour of each maker’s different brands. Indeed, so distinctive was its taste that Amoy’s Gold Label Light Soy Sauce had firmly established itself as the top selling condiment of its kind in the market for many years. This was despite the fact that Amoy spent measurably less on promotion and marketing than its leading rival, Lee KumKee, did. That said, Amoy did have a marketing department and a production department which worked together to launch new sauces based onresults from marketing research.

Amoy built the Green Spot plant in 1958 and subsequently acquired the Green Spot beverage dealership in 1960. In 1977, Vitasoy gave up the Pepsi Cola dealership and transferred it to the Sime Darby Group who were by then owners of Amoy. At that time, Amoy was keen to promote the Pepsi brand. To this end, it purchased soda bottling machines from Germany and hired 40 delivery trucks. Its aim was annual sales of 2,000,000 trays of soft drinks. While working with Pepsi, Amoy also served as an agent of, and produced brands for, beverages such as Mirinda and Green Spot. As the business began expanding too fast and advertising and logistics costs were huge, Pepsi began to createheavy losses during its second and third year with Amoy. As a result, when Hang Lung Group took over Amoy, they immediately closed the unprofitable Pepsi bottling plant. In these early years, the beverages which Amoy represented as agent were only packaged in bottles and cartons, cans were only applied later.

To market its beverages, Amoy employed a direct sales approach to a customer base mainly made up of grocery stores and restaurants. To this end, trucks were used to deliver beverages directly from Amoy’s Ngau Tau Kok plant to customers across Kowloon. Before the completion of the Cross Harbour Tunnel, the company also rented a warehouse in Java Street at North Point. The products were transported from Ngau Tau Kok to the warehouse, so that the products to be sold on Hong Kong Island will be delivered to retail stores by truck. In those days, Amoy’s drivers used to collect empty bottles from the retail stories while deliveringorders to the stores. Each empty bottle can be refunded $0.20 to the users who returned to Amoy. When Amoy later built its Ting Yuen House industrial building at Wong Chuk Hang, it moved the North Point warehouse to the ground floor and leased out the upper floors of the new property. Amoy arranged specific trucks for different product lines under the management of respective divisions. In addition to soy sauce, the trucks also deliveredsoft drinks. Drivers working in the general affairs department not only made deliveryof products but also chauffeured senior executives such as directors and the general manager around town. Beginning in the 1960s, Amoy ran three retail outlets in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Collectively known as the “three big branches”, the outlets were located in Kowloon City, Hennessy Road and Nathan Road which sold Amoy’s core products such as soy sauce, preserved gingers and canned food.

When Cheng Yum Kwai joined Amoy in 1966, the company had about 700 to 800 staff working indifferent divisions such as paper products, Green Spot, soy sauce and machinery, etc. The 1980s saw Amoy’s headcount reach its peak, with the total number of employees reaching over 1,000. Indeed, so big was the workforce, it took fully 110 tables at Ocean Centre to house the Spring Dinner.Back then, Amoy’s paper factory employed about 200 staff while the Green Spot plant which had just closed down and laid off some200-300. Nowadays, Amoy employs just 280 people - some 70 of them were production workers, and 100 or so in production, engineering, research and development, quality control and testing and other departments. The company’s current office, warehouse and transportation department employs some 180 people.

For many years, Amoy’s worker profile was largely male-oriented. Only when it was necessary to cope with seasonal rushes, did the company hire a lot of female workers. During the peak summer seasons of the 1960s to the 1970s, Amoy took on women to peel lychees. In its early days, Amoy did not have a dedicated marketing team so its business department also looked after advertising during the 1960s. After its acquisition by the French BSN Group, Amoy strengthened the marketing strategy for frozen dim sum. In 1982, Amoy had already acquired Convenience Foods International Ltd and actively exploredthe markets overseas such as Japan, the United States and Australia. In doing so, it exported Convenience Foods’ best sellingRoyal Dragon Dim Sum even though the brandwasnot yet Amoy’s core product. After taking control of Amoy, BSN began to change the company’s strategy by focusing on the development of the frozen dim sum export business. To maximise opportunities in the highly lucrative North American market, BSN set up distribution companies in the United States. During this peak period, the number of Amoy employees engaged in the dim sum business reached over 1,000. To cope with the increased demand, Amoy moved its dim sum production lines to Ping Shan in 2002. Currently, the Ping Shan plant employs approximately 700 employees, while the Hong Kong plant’s dim sum division is staffed by some 200 people, around 70% of them being production workers.

In 1967, Amoy manager Cheng Ching Fun began promoting staff training on specially allocated funds from the annual budget for managerial staff to attend business management courses. Cheng Yum Kwai had participated in several training programmes since joining the company. In 1967, he attended courses hosted by the Hong Kong Productivity Council, of which Amoy was a member. In the 1970s, he went on to study at the Hong Kong Management Association, of which Amoy was also a member. In the 1980s and 1990s, Cheng Yum Kwai continued to participate in various types of training programmes. After BSN’s acquisition of Amoy in 1991, more training courses were launched. From the various workshops, Cheng Yum Kwaihad exposed to management theories such as the “7 Habits”, “4 Roles” and Dale Carnegie’s management philosophy, to equip himself with the necessary knowledge to manage his subordinates.

Cheng Yum Kwai had grown up alongside Amoy, living in accommodation provided by the company since a very early age. His parents and elder sisters all worked for Amoy, too. When younger, Cheng Yum Kwai frequently went to the factoryto visit his father, going in and out of it as and when he liked. As both the Cheng and Huang families who owned Amoy in those days were Christian, the company held Sunday school at the Amoy Industrial Estate throughout the 1950s. Presided over by members of the two families, each class was attended by the children of Amoy staff. After the Sunday school, workers would take firewood away from the Amoy Industrial Estate and fetch them back home on wooden carts. Cheng Yum Kwai was subtly influenced by what he learned in these classes and eventually became a devoted Christian. In those years, many Amoy staff were also members of the China Christian Church of Amoy to which Amoy College is affiliated. Cheng Yum Kwai is currently the chairman of the church which is located on Tin Kwong Road at To Kwa Wan.

Amoy’s then managing director, Wong Tuk Sau, had served as president of the CMA for many years. As Amoy was an important member of the CMA, it had participated in several Product Expo events after World War II, investing large sums of money in preparing for each occasion. The Amoy booths at these shows were very special and sometimes won the Expo’s booth design award. Other well known exhibitors in those years included Crocodile and Union shirts, Pak FahYeow and Shaw Brothers. Amoy’s purpose ofjoining the exhibitions was to promote itself by selling high-priced products such as Gold Label Soy Sauce at special booth prices slightly belowthe regular price. Amoy’s staff were generally given entry tickets for them to visit the exhibitions with their family members and friends. Cheng Yum Kwai was not involved in the preparation of Amoy’s booths and only visited the exhibitions and helped out in delivering materialswhile he waswith the general affairs department. Internally, Amoy did not go out of its way to publicise the exhibitions but employees were encouraged to attend them. Staff seldom bought goods from the company’s booths as the Staff Welfare Association already provided them with discounted items.

Miss ginger and Miss HKPE who represented Amoy at each of the exhibitions were recruited from outsideand not from among the staff. Amoy’s in-house advertising department generally was responsible for preparing the company’s booths as most of its staff had strong advertising background. Once it had prepared the drawings and ideas for the expo booths, the advertising department then commissioned specialist design companies to actualise their concepts. Amoy eventually dissolvedthe advertising department following the closure of the Green Spot plant in 1978. In the years up until then, the advertising department was mainly responsible for promoting Green Spot beverages whereas the promotionpublicity for other products wasout-sourced to advertising companies. The CMA was the main organisation in which Amoy’s managerhad participated. Although the Cheng and Huang families who founded Amoy came from Fujian, Amoy was not active in the Fujianese associations, and in 1949 severedthe relationship with its parent company in Xiamen. From then up to now Amoy’s main competitors were Lee Kum Kee and Doll Dim Sum.

Cheng Yum Kwai joined Amoy in 1966 and has now been working with the company for over 45 years. While still a youngster, he started his career at the very bottom and gradually worked his way up to become manager of the engineering department. Amoy’s managers were often specially recruited from outside, and internal promotion of employees like Cheng Yum Kwai was very rare. Always modest, Cheng Yum Kwai often mocked himself as having the lowest academic qualification among all Amoy managers. Today, he says that he feels fortunate that even though Amoy has changed ownership several times, he has always received generous remunerative treatment from each new investor. As a result, his sense of loyalty to Amoy endures to this day.