Mlion's international growth fuelled by steely determination

WHILE many organisations look for expansion opportunities in big cities overseas, steel solutions supplier Mlion Corporation looks for gaps in second tier cities that they can fill with their offerings.

This is how Mlion has swiftly expanded its presence overseas since it was founded 10 years ago, to places including Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and even Timor Leste.

Mlion Corporation is a foundation solution company focusing on waterfront and underground construction, and the company's core business is supplying steel materials. Chairman and CEO Eric Leong says that what sets the company apart is their ability to provide customised solutions based on what their clients need.

Some of the factors Leong attributes to the company's impressive growth internationally include daring to venture overseas, and the abundance of opportunities that second tier cities provided the company.

"Second tier cities have a lot more fertile soil. Capital cities that organisations usually look at typically already have a lot of competition, with many seasoned and mature players," he said.

With its strong international focus, Mlion sees most of its revenue coming from overseas markets, with close to 90 per cent of the company's total revenue coming from the construction sector, said Leong.

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Record-breaking year

This year, Mlion celebrated its 10th anniversary with a record financial year - the first year the company's revenue passed the 100 million US dollar mark, said Mlion's executive director, Sean Cheong.

"That's an increase of 56 per cent as compared to 2020," he said.

The record financial year was achieved despite the pandemic, which had affected many construction companies globally.

Cheong said that the pandemic was one of the greatest challenges the company had faced in the last decade. Customers such as contractors were hit the hardest, and many of them wanted to cancel or delay their orders.

On top of that, air travel was restricted, making it difficult to coordinate and make decisions to solve these problems.

Despite the uncertainty, the company decided to stick to their principle of being "customerobsessed", and allowed their customers to cancel or delay their orders.

Although this resulted in increased expenses for Mlion, Cheong said that they did not want to cause additional stress to their customers during this trying period.

"By forcing them to take the order, it will only add to their cash flow problems. We decided that was not the way to go," Leong said.

"We have always strived to put customers first and that goes a long way for us."

However, the pandemic had a silver lining. The duo noted that the pandemic had accelerated the adoption of technology, and facilitated cross border communication, which increased efficiency for the business.

"Since we now meet digitally, all the sales heads can meet online, so there is greater collaboration and networking," Leong said.

New offerings

Moving forward, Mlion is preparing to diversify and launch 2 new innovations - the first is a platform connecting buyers and sellers of pre-owned steel construction materials called "GoListid".

GoListid provides sellers with a network of overseas and local buyers to sell pre-owned steel materials, and Leong sees this as "a vision in which the company can provide unparalleled signature experience of buying and selling pre-owned steel".

The second business "GoTagID" aims to put a unique identification tag on steel materials by embedding RFID wireless chips inside them.

"This provides traceability for the steel much after the point of sale, which creates greater reusability as we can verify the quality of the steel, where it was made, which year and more," Leong said.

Additionally, he said GoListid will be a running platform in Singapore by the second quarter of 2022, and the company will aim to run the platform in other South-east Asian countries by the third or fourth quarter. The pilot programme for GoTagID will commence in the second quarter of next year.

With the company's constant drive to innovate and provide solutions, Leong revealed that the company is on track to achieving the goal they set at the end of 2019- growing the revenue by 3 times in 5 years.

"We are on track to that goal of hitting US$200 million in revenue, and in fact are now looking to grow even bigger than that," Leong said.

At the end of the day, he highlighted that the most important thing boils down to their vision of creating innovative solutions for customers.

"We want to continue creating engineering solutions for tomorrow's problems. We never shy away from difficult problems, and that will remain the same no matter which market we are in," he added.