Wenzhou Hailuo Group, which originally manufactured umbrellas and soy sauce, also now produces fermentative enzyme bacteria to be applied as additives in environmental animal feeds. [Photo/China Daily]

Soy sauce heir's modern venture is perfect example of way ahead for Wenzhou business

Dressed in a dark jacket, the bespectacled Shao Shaoqing talks nothing but business, in a solemn manner and tone that belie his 29 years.

Heir to a soy sauce fortune and with impeccable academic credentials, Shao is, unsurprisingly, widely considered in his native town to be one of the most eligible bachelors.

Yet he has remained single because, as he explains, "I am too busy with my work to be distracted by such trivia."

Leveraging on the financial resources and technological know-how of his family's soy business, Shao has ventured into what he describes as the "brave new world" of bio-science, establishing an offshoot to produce drugs and related medical products locally, and at a factory in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, which it acquired some years ago.

Shao's company, Hailuo Group, of which he is vice-chairman, was one of the first tenants to move into the government-built Wenzhou High-tech Industry Development Zone, away from the city's old factory district and his family's soy sauce plant.

Armed with a human resources management and psychology degree from the UK, Shao returned to China in 2007 and took an MBA at Zhejiang University in 2009, before taking over his father's business.

In his sparsely decorated office in a modern industrial building, Shao emphasizes that his venture is not a break away from his family business.

"I'd rather call it a breakthrough," he said.

As well as the bio-science activities, his business is also involved in other manufacturing.

In so doing, he said he is helping to set the pace for some much-needed industrial restructuring of this factory town by making a wide range of consumer goods, notably shoes, cigarette lighters and even umbrellas, for export around the world.

Such labor-intensive industries have fallen on hard times in recent years, as rising costs have shaved profit margins to levels often too thin to be sustainable.

This has brought many local entrepreneurs to the view that there is little future in traditional models of development.

Recognizing the problems facing many local small- and medium-sized enterprises, the government last year launched a program of financial reform with the aim of providing funds through properly supervised and regulated channels to factories seeking to move up the value chain.

The more forward-looking business people, especially the better-educated younger ones like Shao, are embracing the change with vigor and passion.