WHEN he was 19, Mr Wong Chung Kang urgently needed to work and support his poor family living in the small town of Pontian in Johore, Malaysia.
So in 1973, he arrived in Singapore and soon got a job as a technician with the Singapore Telephone Board (STB), earning $190 a month.
Today, 35 years later, Mr Wong, 54, is boss to 200 workers in a business that has an annual turnover of $35 million and which is poised to grow bigger.
He is the managing director of ISO-certified S&W Engineering, which designs and custom-makes high-performance heat transfer equipment, known in the business as heat exchangers.
They are used mainly for the oil and gas industry, petrochemical complexes and power plants around the world.This is the first entrepreneurship award for the company.
Mr Wong, a soft-spoken and modest man says: 'I have no impressive paper qualifications. I just want to work hard and make sure my workers progress with this company. I always remember that I have 200 families whose welfare I must keep in mind.'
Mr Wong, who is married to a businesswoman and has two grown-up sons, says that STB had a hand in influencing his future.
After a year there, the board sponsored him for a five-year part-time diploma course in electronics and communications engineering. He graduated in 1979 with a desire to further his studies but his family's financial needs took precedence.
In 1980, he joined Haven Automation, a private-sector company that dealt with marine automation equipment, and over 10 years as its service engineer, he learnt the business and established many useful industry contacts.
The turning point in his life came in 1990 when he and a partner started S&W Engineering to manufacture the same marine automation products. Marine automation and control equipment are devices used to control a ship's generators, engines, monitors, alarm system, temperature control.
Says Mr Wong: 'I worked very hard day and night, and was always prompt in delivering orders to the customers or to do shipboard repairs to enable the vessels to sail on time. Also, I had many clients who already knew me and trusted me.'
He was pleasantly surprised when S&W Engineering, which was later ISO-certified, had an annual turnover of $2 million in the first year and $5 million in the second and over the following few years, raked in between $6 million and $8 million annually.
Because this business was mushrooming in the sector and the competitors were under-cutting one another, Mr Wong decided in 1994 to move into a niche market - that of custom-making heat exchangers for the oil industry.
He opened a small plant recently in Zhang Jia Kang in China to see if the operation would be viable there.
If all goes well, expansion is in the works, says Mr Wong.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on October 22, 2008.
