Anyone who knows Hong Kong from the statistics will be aware that the city is no longer a manufacturing centre. The sector accounts for less than 10% of Hong Kong GDP - hollowed out by the relentless rise in costs.
But in fact Hong Kong has a very strong manufacturing base. It has simply relocated across the border to southern China. By combining the managerial, technical and marketing skills resident in Hong Kong with the abundance of inexpensive land and labour on the mainland, the best Hong Kong companies have created businesses that are among the world's most resilient. None typifies this situation more than Johnson Electric, the world's leading independent manufacturer of custom-designed micro-motors.
Micro-motors are a niche product par excellence. They are the little electric motors that power an increasing range of applications in a whole host of consumer and industrial products. Electric windows in cars are one of the most common examples.
Johnson's rise to power in this tiny corner of the electronics industry has the character of fable. The company's founder, Wang Seng Liang, lost his textile business in Shanghai to the Communist revolution in 1949 and fled to Hong Kong.