The building of an empire: from computers to coffee

NEARLY three decades ago, Tan Wang Cheow embarked on an odyssey that spanned two continents and turned the computer salesman into a coffee kingpin.

Mr Tan, founder and executive chairman of Singapore Exchange-listed Food Empire Holdings Ltd, started out as a dealer in personal computers and disk drives in the 1980s, exporting electronics products to Eastern Europe. Monthly chartered flights from Singapore, carrying consumer electronics goods ranging from video recorders and hard disk drives to TVs and fax machines, were offloaded to local distributors in both Moscow and Almaty.

"In the '80s, telephone directories didn't exist, and phone lines were few and far between. We built our network from scratch, and many of these distributors became our …