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A woman entrepreneur harvesting cool, clear water
A woman entrepreneur from Singapore is harvesting cool, clear water
from unconventional sources in a trend setting business that could
help quench Asia's growing thirst for renewable aquatic resources.
Olivia Lum, founder and chief executive of water treatment firm
Hyflux Ltd., is churning out big bucks by offering technology that
can purify water from rivers and seas on a commercial scale. Hyflux
also makes an appliance that can extract moisture from the air and
turn it into drinking water in a home or workplace. Using advanced
membrane technology to screen out water impurities, the company has
grown from humble beginnings in 1989, with only a seed capital of
S$20,000 (US$12,000), into a publicly listed firm now worth S$487
million. Hyflux has begun construction of a S$200 million seawater
purification plant here in Singapore's first attempt to tap the
ocean surrounding the island to reduce its dependence on imported
water from Malaysia. It also has investments in water treatment
plants in China and plans to bid for the right to build and manage
Singapore's fifth plant that will convert water flushed from sewers
into potable water. The growth potential for water treatment
companies such as Hyflux in the Asia Pacific region is enormous,
experts say. As rivers and other sources become more polluted, there
will be a growing demand to purify raw water for drinking and
industrial purposes using safer and more technologically advanced methods, Lum said in an interview.
A report by the Asian Development Bank says 830 million
people living in the region's developing countries do not have safe
drinking water and more than two billion lack sanitation facilities.
The shortage has resulted in a high rate of water-borne diseases and
deaths, it said, warning water scarcity will also affect food
security in some parts of the region and could increase tensions
between countries sharing the water resources. "As people
see that they will not be able to use the traditional method of
purifying water from rivers because of pollution, the traditional
method can no longer give the kind of comfort level in terms of
quality, in terms of efficiency," Lum said. Lum, 42, said her
company's main focus will be in China, where it operates four water
treatment plants and is building a fifth one. Forty-four percent of
Hyflux's revenues in the last fiscal year came from its China operations.
With its foothold in China, Hyflux is setting up
a distribution network in Asia and the Middle East to market its
latest product called Dragonfly, an electrical appliance that
decondenses air moisture to produce drinking water. A membrane
system and an ultra violet lamp inside the machine purifies the
water, which is dispensed either hot or cold. The air-to-water
machine, costing just over US$1,000, will compete with bottled water
as a low-cost alternative. Lum's story is a powerful, rags-to-riches
tale of how an impoverished village woman from neighboring Malaysia
made it big in the Singapore and the Asian corporate world through a never-say-die attitude.
Abandoned when she was a baby, Lum was
adopted by an elderly woman whom she called grandmother. She grew up
amid poverty and blight in a former tin-mining town in the Malaysian
state of Perak. "Every morning when you woke up, you would hear
people crying, quarreling, fighting because of poverty," she
recalled in the interview. "Sometimes in the morning when
you open your door, you see bloodstains all over because there were
gang fights. "We were living in that area, and generation after
generation they didn't seem to have any improvement in
life." It was that thought which propelled her to achieve
higher things by getting an education. She came to Singapore in 1978
to study, and working while studying, she finished a university
degree and was employed at a multinational company as a chemist in
charge of environmental treatment. It was in this job that she
thought of smaller firms which could not afford to treat and dispose
of waste. "I thought that in no time they're gonna dump all
their waste into rivers without treatment. Over time, people will
have no fresh water to drink," she said. "I embarked on
water treatment from then on. I dreamed about it and decided that I
wanted to give it a try." Resigning from her job despite
objections from concerned friends, Lum sold her house and car and
Hyflux was born. Lum, who eventually became a Singapore citizen, has
been held up by the government as an example to encourage would-be
entrepreneurs. Source: China Post |
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ENTREPRENEUR IN SINGAPORE TURNS WASTE WATER INTO GOLD
