THE tech industry was in a meltdown and his firm was floundering in red ink but Mr Jason Ng decided on an all-or-nothing throw of the dice.

Mr Ng, the managing director of precision engineering firm Grand Team Technologies, went cap in hand to the bank in 2005 to borrow enough money to make a 5-per-cent down payment on new high-end tools.

It was a move born out of desperation, but Mr Ng, 41, said it was his company's only chance to dig itself out of an ever-deepening hole and to stave off bankruptcy.

He had formed a clear strategy amid the gloom and gathering financial storm - gear up with new high-precision equipment and snatch contracts from under the noses of competitors too worried by the downturn to make similar investments.

Grand Team now makes products like dies and connectors which are used by the semiconductor industry to make computer chips.

Part of the plan also involved fending off the creditors until Grand Team gained some traction with its customers, which are primarily in the semiconductor industry.

'I told them 'if you close me down, all you will have is some second-hand equipment', but if you give me a chance, I promise to pay you back eventually,' said Mr Ng.

Luckily, the creditors held off. 'But if any one of them said no and went to court...', said Mr Ng, who let the sentence trail off as he contemplated how close he was to failure.

The gamble paid off. Within a year, Grand Team was able to pay off most of its $300,000 debt. It went on to make enough money to secure the go-ahead to get listed on the Phillip Securities OTC Capital trading platform late last year, the fourth company to do so. This allowed its shares to be traded publicly.

Mr Ng hopes the company, which now has about 20 employees, will eventually list on the Singapore Exchange's secondary board, Catalist, and even upgrade to the mainboard one day.

Net profits last year hit $407,000 on the back of $1.8 million in revenues. In 2006, Grand Team bagged $504,000 in profits and $1.7 million in revenues.

Customers include United Test and Assembly Center, Sanyo, and Tyco Electronics. About 60 per cent of Grand Team's business is from Thailand, 20 per cent from India and the remaining 20 per cent from semiconductor companies in Singapore.

Business now is so good that Grand Team is looking to expand beyond its current premises in a Toa Payoh light industrial building.

That 'steady as she goes' approach has taken Mr Ng a long way from the days when he started in the precision engineering industry as an apprentice fresh out of school.

His progress had a similarly old-fashioned air about it, with a series of promotions that brought him a monthly salary of about $3,000 as a salesman for a Japanese firm in 1997.

Mr Ng admits that it was a comfortable life but he wanted more. Thus he embarked on the first of his big gambles - he quit his job and started a company with a partner.

The firm did not do any precision engineering work but acted as a middleman, taking bigger orders and then sub-contracting them out to other companies.

In 2000, it started its own precision engineering arm and renamed itself Grand Team Technologies and embarked on the roller-coaster ride that was almost derailed by the tech crash.

There have been regrets amid the rewards.

One is that Mr Ng's marriage crumbled because of the pressure of keeping the firm going. Their divorce was finalised this year and the couple have joint custody of their son.

There is also a big business regret - not pursuing a chance to expand into Thailand in 2002.

Mr Ng's own research, as well as inside information from Japanese contacts, told him that that Japanese carmakers had decided to invest heavily in commercial vehicle plants in Thailand. This meant a great opportunity for Grand Team as the Thai high-end precision engineering industry then was practically non-existent.

Mr Ng even managed to persuade a Japanese business partner to give him a contract. He intended to use this as leverage to persuade his then-partners to set up a high-end precision engineering unit in Thailand.

But his partners were concerned about the country's stability, and as Grand Team was then profitable, they did not want to take the risk.

'In the end, I could only sit and watch as the auto business took off in Thailand...precision engineering companies that got contracts from them did very well,' he said ruefully.

His sense of missing the boat was heightened shortly after, when the economic situation in Singapore turned south and Grand Team began sinking into the red.

In 2005, following further disagreements with his partners, Mr Ng bought them out - and rolled the dice again.

He has also taken a valuable lesson from the Thai regret: 'Opportunities, especially big ones, don't come every day, especially when you are a small and medium-sized enterprise. You have to grab it. If another comes, I will grab it.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on April 30, 2008