Cheung Yan: China’s Paper Queen

Midterm Case Study

Cheung Yan is the chairperson and co-founder of the Nine Dragons Paper Holding Company and a truly successful business leader. The company she founded in 1995 was by June 2007 a pulp and paper powerhouse. It had 13 giant papermaking machines, about 8,600 fulltime employees, $1.4 billion in annual revenue and $300 million in profits.

She started off modestly by setting up a small scrap paper brokerage in Hong Kong in 1985. By 1990, she realized that Hong Kong’s market was too small for her ambitions, so she moved to the U.S. and started a paper trading company called America Chung Nam. She was able to collect paper for recycling from all over the US and ship it to China. She was able to keep cost down by using empty shipping containers that were used to bring imports to the US and most of the time they returned back to China empty. By 2004, the company, which had shipped 2.6 million tons of recovered paper to China, was named the top US exporter to China by the Journal of Commerce.

Cheung was able to become successful in China where established paper companies have failed because she believed that one day China would be like Europe or the US. That is why she started to invest in the first paper machine in Dongguan with an international approach, meaning that she imported the machines from overseas, components from the US and Europe, and also the scale of the machine were much bigger than she peers at that time. When she entered the market, the paper industry in China was strewn with manufacturers who were typically small, inefficient and environmentally unfriendly. Her vision for Nine Dragons was the opposite of the market trend. She wanted the biggest, most efficient and environmentally friendly paper company in the market.

By establishing good relationships with the government and by constructing