When I first arrived in Malaysia, I wasn't walking into a business I understood.
I was walking into one I had to learn fast enough to survive in.
I had spent four years in manufacturing in Yemen. It was my first time in Southeast Asia and my first real exposure to international commodity trading.
Palm oil was another world: hedging, price risk, LCs, documentation, shipping, suppliers, buyers and different cultures.
There was no classroom. The business wasn't going to slow down while I learned.
At the time, we were trading around 300,000 tons annually. My job was not only to understand the business. It was to grow it.
That meant learning while building.
I spent countless hours with traders and documentation teams learning the mechanics. But technical knowledge was only one side.
The other was people.
Supplier relationships required calls day and night, lunches, dinners, repeated meetings, trips to Singapore and constant personal attention.
One was Mewah, one of the biggest refiners of palm oil. When I arrived, the relationship needed rebuilding. Through years of working closely with its Managing Director, Dr. Chew, and Head of Trading, Mr. Sham, Mewah became one of our most important suppliers.
At one point, credit exposure from Mewah alone reached USD 107 million.
Not from a bank. From a supplier supporting the business we were building.
Another was IOI, one of Malaysia's biggest private plantation groups. My relationship with Mr. Yong, Head of Trading, became close enough that I invited him to Yemen and showed him our factories and infrastructure.
But suppliers were only half the equation.
I was also travelling intensively to develop and stay close to buyers across the Middle East, Turkey, the Black Sea region and Africa.
Both sides had to move together.
That pace had a personal cost. There were periods when travel, calls, dinners and meetings consumed almost every hour. Sometimes there was barely enough time even to see my children.
In less than five years, volume grew from approximately 300,000 tons to around 2 million tons annually.
As markets grew, capacity followed.
The group progressively built refineries in Medan and Dumai in Indonesia, and Pasir Gudang in Malaysia. Yet our capacity still could not cover the markets we had developed, so outside suppliers remained essential.
Years later, when I look at those refineries, I remember what it cost to make them necessary.
The factories did not create the markets. The markets created the need for the factories.
Had we remained at 300,000 tons, there would have been little reason to build even the first refinery.
People can see factories, machinery and production lines.
What they may not see are the years of learning, risk, travel, relationships and sleepless nights that made those investments possible.