How difficult can it be to make a 50ft composite pole for harvesting oil palm fruits? Very difficult, as it turns out for Casey Teh King Chong of TenAsia Corporation. He jumped into the deep end in 2011 and only managed to solve the problem more than four years later, writes LIM WING HOOI.
AFTER failing a few times, people tend to lose hope and give up — sometimes on the cusp of a breakthrough.
As Albert Einstein once said: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Sometimes persistence will reward you.
That’s certainly true for Casey Teh King Chong, 51, director of TenAsia Corporation, the company he founded to design and manufacture composite poles (called PalmPro which can be assembled to the required length) used to harvest oil palm fresh fruit bunches (FFB).
Teh spent more than four years, between 2011 and 2015, working on his new composite poles without much success. Indeed, he was close to calling it quits after getting a lot of complaints from customers. But he persevered.
“In the early years, we even opened our factory to academicians and others in the effort to get right the mechanics and science of manufacturing the poles made with carbon fibre materials. None were close to it,” Teh remembers.
There was a lot at stake.
He had invested over RM4mil (together with a relative) to start the factory at the Arab-Malaysian Industrial Park, Nilai, Negri Sembilan in 2011. But four years on, and he was still experiencing high reject rates — between 30% and 40% out of the 8,000 poles he produced.
Customer complaints included the poles not being user-friendly and durability issues.
The rejected poles were quickly marketed for other purposes, such as support poles for vertical farming and as boomgates. And Teh decided in mid-2015 to take a one-month break to concentrate on research and development (R&D) to resolve the problem once and for all.
He halted the assembly line and got down to work.
“We purchased large quantity of chemicals and other materials for manufacturing. When they are not suitable to be used in the manufacturing process, they would be kept in the storeroom,” he says, adding that he began to experiment with these surplus materials.
Teh ignored all the instructions on how they should be used, mixing at will according to his intuition.
After all, what did he have to lose?
Somehow, he emerged from this wild experiment with the formula that he had been searching for all along. He promptly fired up production again.
“Our subsequent batches of over 3,000 poles to date have sold with almost no complaints from customers,” he marvels.
By the end of 2015, TenAsia had even begun to export a container’s worth of 60ft poles to Honduras valued at about RM500,000.
It wasn’t just pure dumb luck, of course, that Teh managed to find the solution. He’s an engineer after all and had been working for about 10 years with various engineering companies doing such things as aircraft maintenance and machinery design after he graduated from a local university in late 80s with a degree in mechanical engineering.
It was a cumulation of experience, hard work and, yes, luck, that helped him pull through.
Teh says the need to continue improving himself was what pushed him to start his own company. At the last engineering company where he was employed, the owners were already quite comfortable with where they were and had no intention of expanding further.
Hence, in 1996 he started a machinery installation company with his wife, engaging sub-contractors to work with about 20 customers to set up and install manufacturing equipment at factories.
But the 1997 Asian financial crisis saw many companies holding back from new investments. Many delayed setting up new manufacturing plants, and Teh had to change his business model quickly, turning to selling, maintaining and designing machinery.
He renamed this company Boarding Engineering in 1997, and it’s still in operation.
Boarding Engineering has over 20 clients today comprising automotive and electrical appliances manufacturers.
“We are not your typical consultancy company. We are hands-on, so much so my body has grease,” he laughs, adding that they only have off-days on Chinese New Year as maintenance schedules are largely fixed based on holidays.
The motto for Teh: “When the machines rest, I work.”
As Boarding Engineering grew, the husband-and-wife set-up at their apartment had to expand. They moved to a factory in Puchong in 2001 and employed six workers.
Although revenue from this area was consistent, Teh wanted a business where he could build his own brand and grow. He says the automotive market is rather challenging.
“When you find the value of contracts are declining and there are so many players, it’s a sign that one has to look into different markets,” he explains.
But Teh had no idea of what business to venture into until 2009 when one of his friends talked about the challenges in the oil palm industry.
“Since the 50s, owners of oil palm plantations have been using 50ft aluminium poles weighing 9-10kg. As they are heavy, many were not effective for harvesting FFB that are very high up,” Teh says.
The conversation sparked his interest, and he started to do calculations to formulate viable carbon fibre poles. Teh engaged a manufacturer in China to make his poles, but it was very expensive. His first sale constituted just 30 poles measuring about 40ft in length.
“Then a big order for 300 came in, but with more challenging requirements such as a greater length of 50ft. I travelled to Europe to get someone to manufacture these, but they turned me down, saying the R&D cost was too high. They also said they could sell us the pultrusion machines to manufacture common fibre glass profiles, but then nobody would teach us how to manufacture carbon fibre,” he recalls.
That was when Teh decided he should try his hands at it himself. It was a learning experience that took more than four years, entailing much frustration and disappointment. But here he is now.
“Much of Boarding Engineering’s profits were used to support the R&D efforts of TenAsia Corporation, which we set up in 2011 with a manufacturing plant in Nilai, Negri Sembilan,” Teh reveals.
Today, TenAsia also produces non-conductive poles that can be safely used even when there are electricity cables overhead in the plantation.
The company, which now employs a staff of 12, posted a revenue of RM1.5mil in 2015. Teh says they are also looking to push their poles to other agricultural areas where there’s a need to harvest from tall tress, like coconut plantations.
“There are over 20mil coconut trees in the world, and it costs US$1 to hire a person to go up a tree and collect the coconuts,” he says. TenAsia is also looking into ways to reduce the cost of the poles, which are 30% more expensive than aluminium poles.
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