August 7, 2000

The Web @ Work / E Business (H.K.)

A weekly case study

First Sniff: As managing director of a young garlic-exporting firm in Shenzhen, China, John Huang had a challenge: find a way to reach vegetable importers world-wide and convince them that Chinese garlic is better and cheaper than their current source. Today, it's a no-brainer: Use the Net for marketing. But this was 1997, in China, which lags behind the U.S. in e-business. So Mr. Huang, by turning to the Web, was a first mover in China. His English and computer skills were good enough to make it happen, thanks in part to eight years he had spent researching applied physics before he gave it up to try his luck in business. Now, his five-year-old garlic company is registered in Hong Kong as E Business (H.K.) Co., and he runs a Web site, www.prettygarlic.com.

Cooking It Up: Mr. Huang had been using e-mail since 1995. Then, in 1997, he read in local papers about U.S. companies using the Web for promotion. So he created a series of promotional pages, in English, posting them on any site that provided free space for Web pages, such as Geocities, Xoom and their many Chinese counterparts. Sitting in his office armed with a basic PC and a slow modem, he started looking for discussion boards or other ways to reach vegetable importers world-wide. He then submitted the sites to search engines, all without paying a penny.

Tasting Success: "I got my first reply back from Dubai," says Mr. Huang, who notes he eats two raw garlic cloves a day to ward off cancer. "But they didn't place an order. Then one from Rotterdam, then more and more people coming." Inquiry No. 2, from Rotterdam, Netherlands, resulted in a small sale: about 48 tons of garlic, a deal worth around $20,000. "It wasn't much -- but it was a start," he says. Now, he reckons around 8% to 10% of Net inquiries result in sales, and some 50% of customers are harvested from the Web. This is no small potatoes. His shipments last year were around 15,000 tons.

Home Remedies: While entrepreneurs in the U.S. register an Internet address before they even write their business plan, Mr. Huang waited until April this year to snag the address prettygarlic.com, and now is paying a Chinese Net firm to host the pages. He still designs them himself, though, and much of that is done on a brand-new 733 MHz Pentium III PC with ISDN high-speed access in his home. To save on international call costs, he uses ICQ, a simple messaging system usually associated with chatty teenagers. "I can bargain for hours over prices at almost no cost," he says.

Bragging Rights: While other Chinese garlic exporters have set up sites, they haven't promoted them, he says. Mr. Huang's proudest boast? "If you go to Yahoo and type in 'Chinese garlic,' you only find me."