com the two entrepreneurs, William and Victor Fung were worried about a myriad of problems that could plague the new section of Li & Fung. As William Fung stated, "I"m 51, I"m more than a grey hair in Internet terms, I"m a fossil". After all, lifung.com would not be a typical Internet startup, springing from a almost 100 year old company started at the end of the Qing dynasty in 1906. Both William and his brother Victor are graduates of Harvard Business School and have managed to transform Li & Fung from a family owned business to a professionally managed firm with outstanding growth and potential.
Li & Fung is facing the challenge of opening up a web portal, lifung.com, and not interfering with the more traditional day to day business that is well established in the market. Li & Fung is a company that does over $3 billion in assets. It has grown both organically and through strategic acquisitions. It does business in over 30 countries with outstanding growth potential. Run in a entrepreneurial manner allowing managers to manage teams much like individual companies. Li & Fung is far more sophisticated than a typical trading company. They have evolved into a company that orchestrates the entire production process, all the way from raw materials to the finished product. Through this holistic supply chain management approach, Li & Fung is able to offer its customers more value, more efficiently.
In 1996 Li & Fung adopted a "3 year plan" system modeled after the economic planning system of the Chinese Communist government. The Chinese government plan was based on a 5 year timeframe while Li & Fung's was based on a 3 year time frame. The main principle behind the implementation of this type of planning system was to set concrete goals while analyzing past and future performance to determine how to better achieve these goals. It is in the third "3 year plan", "Doubling Profits", that the new B2B portal, lifung.
