The Chinese “Queen of Beverage Cans” turns a small workshop into a major company

After her retirement, the Chinese businesswoman, Guan Yuxiang, was able to build one of the largest companies specializing in the manufacture of beverage cans, starting from scratch, which earned her titles such as “The Queen of Beverage Cans” and “The Greatest Retired Worker” in China.

Guan was born in 1939 in the city of Shenyang, in Liaoning Province, northeastern China. At the age of 19, she joined work in a factory in the capital, Beijing. Like many of her generation, she devoted nearly 30 years of her professional life to working in the same company, until she retired at the age of 50.

However, Guan did not view retirement as the end of her career. Rather, she considered it the beginning of a new phase full of challenges and ambitions. She decided to embark on an entrepreneurial experience. She began by establishing a small company specialized in producing devices to measure quantities of various physical materials. However, this project did not achieve the desired success. Despite the failure, Guan did not lose her self-confidence. Rather, she believed that failure was a necessary step on the path to success, so she chose to learn from the experience and start over, with careful study of the market and its needs.

In 1994, during a trip to the southern province of Hainan, Guan’s attention was drawn to the wide spread of soft drink factories in the region. At the same time, she noticed that most of the packaging materials used in these factories were imported from Taiwan and South Korea, which revealed to her a promising investment opportunity in the field of manufacturing beverage cans locally.

Guan was able to raise capital of 300,000 yuan (about 42,000 dollars) and founded the “Org Packaging” Company in Hainan. The company imported equipment for manufacturing beverage cans from Taiwan, but the seller initially refused to provide her with the technical information necessary to operate the equipment, claiming that this technology was complex and did not suit the capabilities of the emerging company. Guan later realized that this experience strengthened her conviction in the importance of possessing knowledge and technology as a basis for success and industrial independence.

In 1995, with the entry of the energy drink company “Red Bull” into the Chinese market, Guan and her team sought to win this global company as a strategic client. Reports indicate that the “Org” team made approximately 41 visits to the “Red Bull” company before it succeeded in convincing its management to cooperate with them.

Red Bull agreed to outsource the manufacturing of its cans to Org, but on the condition that it apply powder coating technology, a technology that was considered an international standard at the time, but was not common or familiar to beverage can manufacturers in China.

To achieve this condition, Guan did not hesitate to mortgage the factory in order to import coating technology from Singapore, in a move that reflected her confidence in her project and her willingness to take risks for development. This successful order was a real turning point in the company’s journey, as it opened the door to a series of new orders, and “Org” became a major supplier of packaging for many beverage companies.

The partnership between Org and Red Bull has flourished over more than three decades, and during this period Guan continued to steadily lead the company towards innovation, research and development in the field of modern technologies. This trend resulted in the company obtaining more than 100 patents, which strengthened its position in the market and established its technological superiority.

Over the course of 30 years, “Org” transformed from a small workshop with only 16 workers to a public joint-stock company with more than 4,000 employees, and by 2020, the company’s annual sales exceeded 10 billion yuan (about 1.4 billion dollars), becoming one of the leading companies in the beverage can manufacturing sector in China.

In addition to her remarkable commercial success, Guan devoted a large part of her efforts to charitable work. She established a charitable foundation aimed at supporting students in need, and made donations exceeding 20 million yuan, believing in the importance of giving back to society and supporting future generations. About the South China Morning Post