BBS Group’s Behrouz Gholamrezaey tells JANE CHEONG what are the three things he believes in and how this management approach has worked for him.

BBS Group chairman Behrouz Gholamrezaey remembers the first computer he bought for his company very clearly. "It was an IBM PC machine that came with two floppy disk drives and had only 10 MB of memory, but which cost me US$6,400. But then, that was 1985," he said, smiling ruefully at the memory.

Today we are sitting in his office located in the company’s sprawling 17,000 sq ft Genting Road headquarters, and naturally there is no longer any trace of that ancient exorbitant machine in this age of broadband and advanced technology. What has replaced it is not another desktop, but a sleek black powerful laptop which Mr. Gholamrezaey uses for ‘everything’.

An Iranian by birth, Mr Gholamrazaey first came to Singapore with his wife in 1984 with the original intention of continuing to support his trading business in Iran from here because of trade sanctions back home. But the jovial 53-year-old recalls how the booming opportunities in the region then, especially in the Asian countries that were growing so rapidly, made him decide to stop his trading business and switch to the distribution line instead, forming BBS Electronics in September 1984. "When I first started out, there was just Ms. Tan (his personal secretary for over 16 years) and myself," said Mr. Gholamrezaey. But it was not too hard back in 1985, business was much simpler than today as competition was less stiff, and life was much less complicated.

Working from his first office at Sim Lim tower in early 1985, he managed to gain the distributorship for semiconductors RCA Solid States and the franchise line for PI semiconductors. Gradually, as business improved further, he started employing people and opened a 13,000sq ft showroom in the basement of Sim Lim Tower which he kept until about three years ago.

By 1989, BBS Electronics had expanded from being a small trading operation to a company with a total of 12 staff based at its new premises at Genting Link, which Mr. Gholamrazaey had acquired for about $1 million. He also started taking steps to improve efficiency in his company by installing in-house developed software on its computer network. That year marked a major turning point for BBS Electronics as well, as ……. Them making their maiden foray overseas with the setting up of their first office in…….

1993, BBS had expanded successfully into Malaysia and it had also set up a facility in Houston, Texas. In addition, the company had started diversifying into telecommunications business as well. It was only a matter of time before the Genting Link premises became too small to accommodate BBS’s rapidly expanding business growth. In 1996, Mr. Gholamrazaey bought over a piece of property in Genting Road, where the company’s headquarters are currently located, for a cool $11.3 million. According to Mr. Gholamrazaey, the company also recently expanded its warehouse space in Genting Link from 6,000 sq ft to 10,000 sq ft, bringing the total area that BBS currently occupies in Singapore to about 27,000 sq ft.

Today, BBS Electronics has truly come into its own with a total of 79 local employees and another 43 staff overseas in countries as diverse as Philippines, Indonesia and ……….. is engaged mainly in the distribution of semiconductor components and is the authorized distributor for 19 product lines such as Advanced Mirco Device, Philips, ST Microsystems and Fuji Electric. The company posted revenues of $97 millions for the year to January 2000, up form $91.1 million the previous year. It was profitable even during the ..….. regional economic crisis, which speaks volumes for the company’s adaptability …….. of situations.

Perhaps the secret to BBS Electronics’ success is best embodied in Mr. Gholamrazaeys’ fundamental management philosophy. "I believe in three things: people, knowledge and empowerment," he stresses. ‘If people are not empowered to make decisions to ……. Issues at work, productivity drops and creativity and innovation are also not the… empowerment should come with knowledge." And what he means by empowerment with knowledge is constantly sending all of his staff ‘from the first to the last person in the company" for professional re-training classes, enabling them to keep up to date with the latest developments in technology.

According to Mr. Gholamrazaey, some of the future expansion plans for this medium …. Enterprise include going for a listing "sometime soon", mainly to raise funds for ……. Purposes, and also enlarging their present stable of distributorships for product lines as well as expanding into the Middle East, Thailand and North Asia by the end of …….

An engineer by training, Mr. Gholamrazaey is well aware that the advent of the n….. knowledge-based economy calls for a shift in mindsets and perceptions, and he …… the challenge confidently.

"Today, we don’t just look at balance sheets or profits and losses alone. In my opinion, the value of companies goes way beyond balance sheets and mere accounting. We have to look at what our customers want, what they do, and what they like. So it’s a two way relationship between both parties," he said. "And in the New Economy, we are talking about intangible assets – and not just those that belong to companies. If the Old …… looked at the past, then the New Economy looks into the future."

The company, which made its debut on the E50 list this year, was ranked No.44.