Liang Boqiang And His Nail Clipper Empire

If 47 year old Liang Boqiang sits in front of you, you can not see that he is a wealthy Guangdong boss: wearing ordinary casual wear, pumping seven yuan a pack of Hongta mountain, will enthusiastically pour tea for you.

In 1985, he began to run factories. In 1998, he has become the largest manufacturer and exporters of artificial jewellery in China.

Now, he is the largest supplier of nail clippers in China. He sells the nail clippers worth nearly two hundred million yuan to the world every year.

In October 1962, Liang Boqiang was born in a poor family in Xiaolan Town, Zhongshan.

Liang Boqiang, who likes quiet, does not spend his time playing like most of his peers. He studied with a rural teacher for nearly ten years.

And that interest changed his life.

Liang Boqiang was 16 years old when he graduated from high school in Macao. At that time, because of the geographical advantages of Hongkong and Macao, there was a "sneaking tide" on the coast.

At that time, the two villages separated by a river in Shenzhen and Hongkong had a hundred times annual income.

On the evening of April 1980, Liang Boqiang, 18, took a rice ball and three companions and jumped into the icy sea at Bayi dam on Xiaolin farm in Zhongshan. They wanted to sneak across to Macao on the other side.

On the second morning, after spending more than ten hours in the sea, the exhausted rural youth saw high-rise buildings for the first time.

Liang Boqiang's first job in Macao was a porter in a jeans factory.

During the day, I was too tired to eat and sleep in the warehouse at night.

But such work is only a month's income of 30 yuan.

After having some understanding of Macao, Liang Boqiang began to consider "job hopping".

Three months later, a job advertisement made Liang Boqiang a painter of an antique furniture factory in Macao.

The new job that paid for the piece made Liang Boqiang's monthly income soar to more than three thousand or four thousand yuan (equivalent to three hundred or four hundred yuan at that time).

A year later, Liang Boqiang had 30 thousand Portuguese dollars, and he had the idea of starting a business.

He leased everything to rent a metal shed at a remote mountain foothill in Macao, and hired two young workers who had stolen from Zhongshan to work as furniture workers. They began to provide furniture services for local furniture factories.

Because Liang Boqiang has only one temporary identity card in Macao, he is doing business in a state of anxiety every day.

A few months later, late in the night, the Macao police conducted a drug clearance operation near the factory. The harsh siren made Liang Boqiang mistakenly believe that he had opened the factory and was known by the police.

On the second day of dawn, he lifted his hands to the door of the customs.

After nearly ten hours of interrogation, Liang Boqiang, wearing shorts and short blouses, returned to Xiaolan Town in a panic.

After more than a year, in order to make a living, Liang Boqiang picked up the basket and sold the salted fish and ice lolly along the street.

In October 1984, Macao suddenly announced that a person with a temporary identity card could exchange his official identity card.

Liang Boqiang once again went to Macao illegally and retrieved his temporary identity card from his friends.

In the mid 80s of last century, with the development of reform and opening up, a large number of Hong Kong and Taiwan funded manufacturing enterprises sprung up in the Pearl River Delta region, and the Mainlanders began to come from all directions.

In April 1985, Liang Boqiang once again returned to Xiaolan Town to help Hongkong boss set up a jewelry factory in the area.

At that time, his monthly salary had reached 5000 yuan.

In the Pearl River Delta, a factory with family workshops is mushrooming. Liang Boqiang, who has technology and management, is thinking of starting a business on his own.

With two manual punching machines, Liang Boqiang opened a small workshop at home and started his old line of artificial jewelry.

After the product was produced, he wholesale to dealers in Guangzhou, Yiwu and other places.

Not long after, Liang Boqiang, who had a certain capital, set up a factory in Xiaolan Town, and began his real boss career with Zhejiang Yiwu as the main market.

In order to open up the market, Liang Boqiang, like countless small shop owners in the Pearl River Delta, is carrying large bags of small bags of products from Guangzhou to Zhejiang on the train.

In 1998, Liang Boqiang has become a large domestic production and sales of artificial jewellery, with sales of up to 60 million yuan.

In 1998, when Liang Boqiang was suffering from the increasingly difficult market of artificial jewellery, he unwittingly read a piece of news in the newspaper. The main idea was that a leader of the State Council, taking the quality of domestic nail clippers as a general example, demanded that light industry enterprises strive to improve product quality and develop new products.

After reading the news, Liang Boqiang realized that a new market opportunity is emerging.

At that time, a few state owned nail clippers factories in China were already on the verge of collapse. Most of the domestic nail clippers sold in the market came from small workshops in Guangdong and Zhejiang.

But all these products share a common characteristic: low price but rough workmanship.

In April 1999, Liang Boqiang's first batch of nail clippers came out.

He used a foreign friend's name "ST.Allen" to name his nail clippers.

According to public information, Liang Boqiang's middle and high grade nail clippers now occupy the first and third market share in the world.

He said that all his thoughts are now on the nail clippers, hoping to "make the nail clippers as Swiss Army knives, Zippo lighter products."

Du Jun, editor in chief: