H. C. Ting, managing director and principal owner of Kader Industrial Co., Ltd. at North Point, began as a battery salesman for a Shanghai factory, set up his own company, the Wei Ming Battery Works, in 1925, and began tinkering around in a laboratory to develop a long-lived battery. He picked up his chemistry as he went along and painstakingly dissected hundreds of messy cells until he evolved a really durable battery that sold well. He branched into flashlights, bulbs and carbon rods, survived the Japanese invasion of China and planned to try his luck in the plastics industry after the war. Foreign exchange limitations made it impossible to equip a plastics factory in Shanghai, so he sent a group of his employees to Hong Kong in 1947 with instructions to set up a plant. The new factory was to include a cold-storage unit which could cool and store plastics and also make ice for sale. It was a dismal flop and Mr. Ting hurried down the following year to untangle the snarls. He soon discovered that he had, in effect, enrolled himself for a cram course in refrigeration engineering, but he learned enough to make the plant pay. Today the North Point plant, greatly enlarged, employs 1,300 people and makes 400 different plastic items. Its four-story building of prestressed, reinforced concrete backs into a rocky hillside which is being blasted away to make room for a new ten-story plant. Mr. Ting trains all his own workers, pays them straight wages instead of the usual piece-work rates and hands out annual bonuses, in some instances, equal to ten months’ pay. Operating on the general premise that he’ll try anything until he makes it work, Mr. Ting designs many of his own products, and if he can’t find a machine to make it, designs that also. One machine molds a plastic automatic pistol and its bullets in a single operation; the model is so precisely fitted that it works as smoothly as the original gun. Other machines mold a pair of binoculars with one press, then equip it with accurate lenses stamped out of clear Styrene plastic. A plastic doll, including the eyes, is pressed out in seconds, but the mold has been carefully developed from a hand-made clay original that is reproduced first in plaster of Paris and then in polyester before the steel die is cut. Dressing the dolls keeps 100 girls busy at Kader sewing machines. The plant works three shifts daily, but Mr. Ting sleeps through one shift at his penthouse on the roof. His latest venture is transistor radios, jointly undertaken with a Japanese electrical appliance company. “We can compete with anything except junk,” Mr. Ting said. “If Hong Kong turns out quality products at reasonable prices, we can gradually raise the living standards of our labor to the level of other countries. It can’t be done overnight; they tried it in Red China and failed.”