Malaysia has its share of such successes that have sprouted from unconventional business models.
FMT Business takes a look at two Malaysian companies that have taken the path less travelled, and profited from it.
In an era when people were already buying their favourite reads online, Big Bad Wolf Books Sdn Bhd (BBWB) decided to go big in the traditional brick-and-mortar store.
That was in 2007 and bookstores were already seeing a downtrend in purchases. But Andrew Yap and Jacqueline Ng, business as well as life partners, were unperturbed.
The co-founders of BBWB opened their first store — branded as BookXcess — at the Amcorp Mall in Petaling Jaya that year. It has since grown into a chain of 23 stores, including four in Singapore.
Yap and Ng’s rationale was that with their competitors winding up, there would be readers left without a bookstore to go to. It was a matter of catering to their needs.
“I just felt that whoever was downsizing or exiting the market was just not seeing the trend (well) enough, which was to try and survive until (the market) picked up again,” Yap said.
For the record, 95 bookstores in the country have closed down since 2018, according to the Malaysian Book Publishers Association.
The fact that 90% of Malaysians who can read but don’t also made Yap and Ng realise that there was a huge untapped market.
But the raison d’être for BBWB is its annual Big Bad Wolf sale. This is when its books are sold at scandalously low prices.
The first sale, in May 2009 at Dataran Hamodal in Petaling Jaya was such a huge success that it prompted Yap and Ng to hold another sale six months later.
As of today, the Big Bad Wolf sale has been held in 15 countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, the UAE, Uganda and Kenya.
Collectively, it now rakes in the lion’s share of the company’s revenue.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure
When brothers Thomas and Vicas Pui and their friend Yanni Ching launched their start-up in 2019, they were going into uncharted territory.
Of course their business model — turning biowaste into feed — was not new. Others have done it with a measure of success.
However, the trio have a little something extra. Along with the food also comes fertilisers.
Both products come through the same production process — treating biowaste and organic by-products with the use of black soldier fly larvae.
The process involves feeding the larvae with food waste. The protein-rich mature larvae eventually ends up on the dinner table while the frass (excrement) produced by the larvae is processed into fertiliser.
Essentially, it’s getting feed and biowaste from the same source and through the same process.
Under a business-to-government (B2G) arrangement, the trio’s company Entomal Biotech Sdn Bhd will work with local authorities to process waste.
It will deploy its mobile bio-conversion unit, which is basically a low-energy and environmentally-friendly waste-processing system housed in a standard container, to the local authorities.
The system has already been rolled out in Shah Alam, and other areas such as Petaling Jaya and Subang Jaya will soon be covered.
In a business-to-business (B2B) arrangement, Entomal Biotech is working with FGV Holdings Bhd to build a plant with the capacity to process up to five tonnes of waste a day.
It also has plans to independently build its own biowaste-conversion facility, which is expected to be located in Rawang.
In the longer term, Entomal Biotech hopes to resolve food waste problems across the country.
The Pui brothers and Ching’s concept has won over start-up accelerators such as Sidec, hoping to raise RM13 million in funding for the company.