PowerPlus - Promising Brands and CitiBusiness Regional Brands Winner

IT WAS an order from the United States Army that gave the fledgling heavy equipment brand PowerPlus an important break in 2005.

A contact of PowerPlus founder Derrick Ong convinced the army that the company, which makes its machines in China, would be able to deliver the time-sensitive order.

And PowerPlus did, shipping the pieces of equipment to Dubai and then - in a move that raised eyebrows - airlifting them to Afghanistan and to Djibouti in Africa, where they were needed.

That caught the attention of potential customers in the Middle East, and orders started trickling in. Later, through word-of-mouth, customers from South America, Africa, South Asia and elsewhere bought its machines as well.

PowerPlus is just three years old, but the company from which it stemmed has been around since 1973. Started by Mr Ong in Singapore as Worldwide Techno-Equipment, it traded in used bulldozers, forklifts and other heavy machinery.

Dwindling supplies of used equipment led Mr Ong to look for new machines in China. But China brands suffered an image problem as a result of the days when many China-made products were shoddy and after-sales service was practically non-existent.

That was why Mr Ong, with the help of teenage son Marcus, came up with PowerPlus - a new name to stamp on the quality machines they sourced from China.

They incorporated a company in the US and infused the brand with a Western image, for example, by having its brochures carry photographs of the company's agents in the West.

"In the technology arena, Western countries are the front-runners. The memory of inferior products by unscrupulous manufacturers is not easy to erase. We have been able to validate this assumption when customers chose our products instead of China-branded ones because of our Western branding efforts," says Mr Marcus Ong (above).

He may be just 17 and still a polytechnic student, but he has already taken over much of the running of the business after helping his 49-year-old father build up PowerPlus over the past three years.

A positive brand image - backed by quality products, reasonable prices and good service from carefully selected agents - has seen PowerPlus' turnover grow from $2 million in 2005 to over $20 million this year.

The company has acquired a plant in Changzhou, China, and will start production of its own machines next year.

The PowerPlus name has been registered in Singapore, the US and India, and work is in progress to get it registered in over 100 countries worldwide.

Happy to have won the Singapore Prestige Brand Award in two categories - Promising Brands and CitiBusiness Regional Brands - the young man is nevertheless aware that PowerPlus still has a long way to go.

"This is not the 100m dash. This is a long march in which I have to soldier on and power ahead upon what my father has painstakingly built," he says.

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