When Lim Peng Jin joined his family’s Malaysia-based corporation Scientex in 1991, it became a jumble of eighty barely profitable subsidiaries, with operations from car-seat covers to palm oil plantations. “It becomes no way to run an agency,” says Lim, now 51. Fast forward to these days: Scientex celebrated its fiftieth-anniversary last yr with a reported income of 290 million ringgit ($70 million) on revenues of two.6 billion ringgit.
The agency has shed the maximum of its subsidiaries and is focused on belongings and packaging, reducing wrap in most cases. It now pursues greater than double its shrink wrap manufacturing potential over the next decade to at least one million tonnes from 455,000 tonnes. Lim’s father, Lim Teck Meng, started Scientex in 1968 in a small rented manufacturing facility throughout the border from Singapore in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Only forty workers made PVC leather-based seat covers for customers, including General Motors, Honda, Nissan, and Proton.
The elder Lim, now 81, ceased to be a primary shareholder of Scientex in 2017, shifting much of his proportion to Peng Jin and his brother Peng Cheong, a non-executive director at the corporation. The brothers are ranked No. 30 in the Forbes Malaysia rich list, with a combined internet worth of $640 million. Scientex’s stock, indexed in Malaysia, is up around 30% during the last two years, to about 9 ringgit.
Peng Jin joined Scientex as a set government director after a degree in chemical engineering from Japan’s prestigious University of Tokyo. One of his first movements changed to discontinue the low-margin automotive business and invest somewhat in better-boom commercial and consumer packaging. Scientex launched its packaging business in 1994, beginning with corrugated boxes.
Three years later, Lim assorted into stretch film packaging, generally called decrease wrap. Today, Scientex claims to be Asia’s largest producer of reducing cover. Scientex went into belongings in 1995, converting palm oil plantations in the southern Malaysian kingdom of Johor into less costly housing estates. Scientex has built more than 17,000 housing devices in the past two years and plans to make an additional 50,000 within the next ten years to use its landbank for Malaysia’s duration. Lim says boosting cut-back wrap manufacturing will help his purpose of quadrupling Scientex’s sales to ten billion ringgit via 2028. “Cash-float technology offers us the possibility to invest and grow bigger,” he says.
