COMMENT | 99 Speedmart - a victory for all Malaysians

COMMENT | May there always be people like Lee Thiam Wah in this country! Surely, he is one of Malaysia’s greatest entrepreneurs in living memory.

With virtually nothing and starting from scratch, he built a retailing empire, 99 Speedmart, employing some 22,000 people of all races and religions. And better still, he employs only Malaysians and treats them all equally.

To all those business people who hobnobbed with the corrupt and corruptible and bribed their way to fame and fortune, claiming in private and without batting an eye that this is the only way of doing business in Malaysia, take a good hard look in the mirror and ask whether you can match Lee’s business acumen or application. Shame on you!

Shame also on all those who measured the success of the company he founded and nurtured to listing last week in the main bourse of KLSE through the narrow prism of the premium it commanded on opening day or the fact that he is now a billionaire.

They have missed the point and the moral lessons behind his success.

The struggle is real

Is it wrong to demand hard work and discipline from employees while complying with all the applicable labour laws of the country? Shouldn’t we expect such dedication from all employees? From our national sports teams? From our ministers and civil servants, uniformed and not?

You can trick a few employees into working under unfair and unjust conditions but surely not thousands of staff.

And Lee, more than anyone, knows that his employees are an integral part of 99 Speedmart, which clocked in a turnover of RM2.4 billion the last financial year to earn a slim net margin of some 5.5 percent.

It’s a tough business. Every sen was chased down, overheads watched like a hawk, stocks purchased only after some hard bargaining, and the operations kept running 24/7 to increase market share.

Picture this: within hours of 99 Speedmart trucks making a fresh delivery of stocks, household staples like coffee, sugar, tea, and rice literally fly off the shelves.

Reason: stall operators in the locality know these delivery times and make a point of stocking up on the day of their arrival. They, too, work on thin margins and, without the retailing genius of Lee, will soon run out of business. Or raise prices.

Not joining the bandwagon

So how does he do it apart from hard work and application? First, his tagline. “Dekat lagi murah”, near and cheap. Brilliant!

He first started his business at a time when the retail industry was dominated by big players, including giants like Giant, Carrefour, and Tesco, spelling the death of mum-and-pop shops. The future of retail is the hypermarket, said the “experts”. The bigger the better!

Lee, with only a few years of formal education, betted on small neighbourhood shops, believing that David could slay Goliath not with a sling but with service and low prices. He began opening outlets in the shop lots of every Taman.

Meanwhile, the “big boys” of retail bought up real estate and worked with local and state authorities to build their hypermarkets. Real estate play disguised as customer care.

Undaunted, Lee kept growing his outlets - the first 100, then 500, then 1,000, and now the present 2,400. This phenomenal growth even fuelled a rumour that the real owner of 99 Speedmart was Rosmah Mansor, the wife of the then prime minister of the country!

Soon, the big boys with their hypermarkets were floundering like the proverbial fish out of water. By now, Lee had clout with manufacturers and producers. Placing orders for ever-larger quantities of stocks, he bought more for less.

Yes, with heft comes clout. It was he who now said to them “Win-win mah!”.

We all win

The beneficiary of all this is the ordinary man, especially the B40 and the M40. Together, they accounted for some six million hard-pressed households.

My “back of the envelope” calculation indicates he puts RM50-70 in the pockets of these households every month if they stock up on household essentials and a bit from 99 Speedmart.

This is the real meaning of providing value to your customers, and it probably outmatches the aid dished out by the government under various schemes with names that play on words centred around prihatin, or care.

Surely, he stands head and shoulders above the people who are labelled industry czars when in truth it was the government and their political connections that were the so-called secrets of their success. Yes, it includes our three “Baby Docs”!

Lee did not receive a single sen of special aid or subsidy and, perhaps, he even made a small margin by efficiently distributing price-controlled items!

And we should all take note of this singular fact from the success of wheelchair-bound Lee: Malaysia is a land of opportunities, not riches as most racist politicians would want us to believe.

Yes, it’s a land of abundant rain and sunshine, but what’s its use if nothing is planted, carefully nurtured, and nourished?

Lee of 99 Speedmart planted a seed some three decades ago and has now reaped the harvest. It’s not often that a whole country benefits from such a harvest.

And unlike former prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob, who declared jihad on middlemen and lost big, Lee declared the same about the rising cost of living and won big! We must all wish him every success in the future.

Here is wishing Lee Thiam Wah and all his hardworking and dedicated employees, Selamat Hari Malaysia!

MURALE PILLAI is a former GLC employee. He runs a logistics company.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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