Ambition In Spades

Who would ever have guessed that Chiau Haw Choon, Group Managing Director of Chin Hin Group Bhd, was once a secondary school dropout with little more than mischief on his mind? While he successfully transformed his family company into a billion-ringgit building materials conglomerate, his own compelling story of change, self-determination and courage proves equally inspiring.

- Renyi Lim

No one, it seems, is more startled by Chiau Haw Choon’s success than he is. At the age of 34, not only is he Group Managing Director of Chin Hin Group Bhd, which means he’s in charge of Malaysia’s only building materials conglomerate to offer solutions across the value chain, but he’s also about to compete for this year’s EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year (WEOY) award in Monte Carlo in June.

“I don’t think I was surprised by how well Chin Hin Group has performed,” he muses. “We’ve worked very hard to grow the business, after all. The surprise has been more about me: at 17, I would never have believed a person who started so late in life could ever become Bursa Malaysia’s youngest head of a public-listed company, or even the youngest EY Entrepreneur Of The Year winner in the award’s 16-year history in Malaysia.”

It is belief, however, that has played a major role in Chiau’s personal journey: not just the ability to believe in himself, but to place his faith in the importance of mentorship, of holding true to the values of integrity and trust, and in moving onwards and upwards. His story is one of a young man who believed he could – and did.

BUILDING BLOCKS