A businessman reborn
By Emma Jacobs
Published: March 8 2011 22:28 | Last updated: March 8 2011 22:28
It’s his heart. That is Wing Yip’s explanation for his success in creating a multimillion pound food empire. Many immigrants to Britain have been content to keep their businesses small, says Mr Yip, a Chinese Hakka, originally from Hong Kong. But he put his heart into his new home. “A lot of immigrants don’t keep their heart here. If you do, it means you invest your money here rather than buy property back home”.
In fact, the bespectacled 73-year-old likes to say he was born twice: once in Hong Kong and again in England. “If I could change my date of birth on my birth certificate, I would change it to [the date of] my arrival here,” he says.
Mr Yip identifies strongly with the eastern European Jewish immigrants who fled to Britain in the late 19th and 20th century and established businesses. He studied books on retail chains set up by immigrants and the children of immigrants such as Tesco founder Jack Cohen and Michael Marks, co-founder of Marks and Spencer. He has ambitions to expand into chinaware and furnishings “like M&S”. And, yes, he says, a lot of his best “friends are Jewish”.
Now, as chairman of Wing Yip Group, he presides over a family business that includes his three brothers and four children – Albert, Brian, Cindy and David; “E is for error we didn’t make,” he cackles over his own well-rehearsed joke.
Mr Yip operates supermarkets from four distinctively green-and-yellow-tiled sites (two in London, one in Birmingham, another in Manchester), which also rent space to businesses from restaurants to solicitors to beauticians that provide services to the Chinese diaspora. Last year pre-tax profits on his supermarket group were £6.2m on a turnover of £98m.
Like Cohen and Marks, Mr Yip began with nothing. “I had to start from scratch,” he says in Hong Kong-accented English. When the Communists came to power in China in the 1940s, the party seized his family’s wealth in China, derived from soft drinks production in Jamaica. “By European standards, we were poor, but by Asian standards it was very normal,” he says over a dim sum lunch of prawn dumplings and peppery squid in a large Chinese restaurant next to his hypermarket in north London.
He struggled to make a living in Hong Kong, then a British colony. In 1959, aged 21, Wing Yip left his family and friends behind in Hong Kong. He pulls a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and mops his eyes as he recalls the experience. “I’m an old man,” he says.
Wing Yip’s tips for success
● There is no secret. “And even if there was, a hidden secret to building a business I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
● Timing and place are crucial. “I have seen countless people go bust because of missing one of these factors.”
● Work hard and think hard. “You can’t do anything if you are lying on a beach looking at the sun.
● Cash and property.“You need cash flow and you need to build a property portfolio as securitisation for the banks. Look at any large company – its property units are often as big as their central business.”
With £50 and the name of a friend’s uncle – Mr Wong – as a work contact, he set out for England. But when Mr Yip arrived he found Mr Wong had gone, so he made his way to Liverpool’s Chinatown, where he washed up in a Chinese restaurant. Northerners were hospitable, he says. “They would show you to the bus and tell the bus conductor to tell you when to get off.” He did encounter some racism, when at the weekends “young [fishermen] would cause problems when drunk. But later they would come back and apologise.”
Mr Yip was soon waiting tables, where he watched and learned, and rode around on a Vespa scooter to immerse himself in the culture. In the late 1960s, he and three friends bought “Nan’s teahouse”, a former teashop in which they converted into a Chinese restaurant. “In those days you could get only fish and chips after 9pm. We stayed open till 11.30.” The menu always included some English fare, such as bacon and eggs. “If a family came along and the grandma didn’t like the food, they might not come again.”
Success encouraged the four to expand. This was the “takeaway generation”, when thousands came over from Hong Kong, set up high street restaurants, and made chow mein a British dish. Mr Yip saw an opportunity in supplying this booming trade, and in 1970 opened a store in Birmingham, selling more than 1,000 Chinese products to restaurants as well as local Chinese families.
Before lunch, Mr Yip showed me round the north London shop. Tuna, marlin and seabass fill the freezers and the shelves are stacked with all kinds of noodles, coconut sauces and curry paste. Like the food, he says, his workforce reflects the diverse Chinese community. He summons an employee: “Where are you from?” The 20-something says he is English. “Where are your parents from?” Mr Yip insists. The father is Malay Chinese, the mother British.
It is quiet before the post-lunch surge of restaurant owners who buy 85 per cent of Mr Yip’s stock, with the rest bought predominantly by Chinese individuals and families. There is a smattering of non-Chinese customers, too, a market that is growing, he says, due to the increased number of westerners experimenting in their kitchens.
More shelf-space is now given to spicy soy sauce. Eight years ago Mr Yip realised a surge in demand was an indication that more Chinese from the mainland were coming in. “Every seven to 10 years the market changes,” he says. Most staff are Cantonese speakers, but many are learning Mandarin to converse with those from mainland China.
Sourcing supplies has become easier as mainland Chinese exporters became more professional. Recently, however, the cost of importing to Britain has risen because of the strong renminbi and higher fuel prices.
His business philosophy is simple – to give customers “what they want and get what you want”.
He has no plans to retire but he does start the working day later. Many decisions have, however, been devolved to the chief executive – his nephew Henry. Why is none of his four children in the top job? “He’s the most able. You run the business by head not by heart,” he says.
The pragmatism is revealing: in spite of the earlier claims that heart is the basis for his empire, clearly sentiment does not cloud his judgment. His children, who call him “chairman” or “Wing Yip” at work, understand, he says.
Mr Yip expects the business to remain a family concern for generations and would rather have £5m for five generations than £1bn for one. “We’re immigrants – we don’t want to be poor again”. But he frets that the third generation might lose his immigrant zeal for making money. “If you give an animal all the food it wants, why should it hunt?”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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