It’s taken Robert Yap, CEO of homegrown logistics group YCH, years to turn a failing transport company into a regional supply chain powerhouse. “We’ve moved from transporting people, to moving cargo, to warehousing, freight forwarding and third party logistics,” he explains. “Our business is now supply chain management. It’s much higher up the value chain.”

Yet at a fundamental level, transporting goods is something YCH are very good at. “Order a Dell computer in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia or India and we’re the ones delivering them to your home,” says Yap. “And anytime a Dell Computer is down, we’re the ones who collect your computer, change the parts, or replace it with a new one.”
Inheriting a transport company some 30 years ago, this year’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Singapore has built a company that owns and operates a network of warehouses across Asia Pacific — a network that collectively manages over US$50 billion in inventory.

And inventory management is their specialty. With a regional network of YCH-operated warehouse facilities, the company is the cross-border conveyor belt that links production lines in China, with assembly plants in Southeast Asia, and customers across Asia Pacific.

It’s this very infrastructure that allows Dell, the pioneer in the made-to-order, delivered to your doorstop PC, to build and deliver as many PCs as it can sell, at any given time, to anywhere in the world. Yet YCH doesn’t just deliver computers from Dell, it actually brings computers to Dell — by managing the computer-maker’s suppliers. “One notebook computer may have 100 components but if 99 are there and one part is missing, the product cannot ship. The supply chain has to be perfect,” says Yap. A daunting task given that a computer can house many tens of components supplied over 200 vendors.

In 1983, YCH acquired Freight Connections Worldwide Pte Ltd and Regional Forwarding & Warehousing Management Pte Ltd. With this move, YCH could now market itself as a one-stop shop.
The business took off and by 1992, the company had established its flagship warehouse complex, YCH DistriPark, at Tuas. YCH had also made its first foray overseas, through a joint venture warehousing facility in Penang a year earlier. Today, the company now operates in every major Asian city from Singapore and Surabaya to Tianjin to Bangalore. New facilities for Korea and Japan are on the cards for 2009.

“We have been growing at a compounded annual rate of almost 20 percent for the last three years. In China, we grew about 100 percent last year,” he says, “The real challenge is – how do we support this growth?” he adds.

With the business healthier than ever and his contributions recognised through the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Robert Yap is a successful and respected entrepreneur at many levels. Yet success, the second-generation entrepreneur says, is about being surrounded by people you are happy to be with.  “And as the boss, I get to chose those people,” he jokes.

For the foreseeable future, he is also likely to stay the boss, with YCH likely to remain in private hands. “Yes, we’ve been offered a lot of money but I’m not interested. I’d like to leave behind a legacy. A Singapore brand known globally, a name synonymous with the supply chain solutions,” he reveals.