Dr Chia Song Kun
Group managing director, QL Resources Bhd (Master)

Born into a poor fisherman’s family in Sg Buring in Selangor, Dr Chia Song Kun, the group managing director of QL Resources Bhd, almost had to stop schooling at an early age. He, together with his siblings, also had to go hungry for most of the days.

The headmaster of his school pleaded with his father to let him continue schooling as Chia had shown an aptitude for academic work. His brothers supported his secondary and tertiary education, resulting in him earning a first class hounours degree in  Mathematics from Universiti Malaya.

After graduating from Universiti Malaya, Chia became a lecturer at a local university for 10 years.

It was during his lecturing years that he caught the entrepreneurial bug and founded two businesses in the sectors he knew best — QL Resources, founded in 1987 as a small-scale distribution network for animal feed raw materials, and Inti College (now Inti Universal Holdings Bhd), set up with some colleagues from the university.

Determined to free his family from the shackles of poverty, his first venture in 1977 was harvesting seashells in the muddy coastal areas and selling them as animal feed, a venture he and his brothers named Chia Brother Oyster Meal Co.

The period 1977 to 1986 saw the family business expanding into fishery, agriculture and plantation.

Adopting values of trust, win-win and innovation, he nurtured the business into one of Asia’s biggest producers of surimi, or fish paste, a leading local poultry egg producer and a listed resource-based agriculture company with a market capitalisation of over RM2.5 billion.

Today, besides  producing eggs, broiler and day-old chicks, QL Resources is  one of Southeast Asia’s leading marine product producers and is involved in oil palm cultivation in Sabah and East Kalimantan.

Dr Chia believes that the most important factor in business success is execution. An average idea, executed well, can become a successful venture.

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on Dec 3, 2012.