Carlos Chan is the Potato Chips King of the Philippines, and China. His Oishi snack food brand is one of the best known and the best-selling in the world’s most populous country.
Carlos Chan’s Liwayway Group has 15 factories in 10 provinces in China, including a facility on the border of Kazakhstan. The headquarters and the state-of-the-art main factory sit on a 17-ha lot. in Shanghai. In the Philippines, the main factory is Oishi’s 40-hectare compound in Cavite. Oishi has five factories in the country.
Carlos is also investing in hotels in the Philippines with the giant Jinjiang hotel brand of China, and with the JCO donuts of Indonesia.
Oishi is also manufactured in Vietnam, where it has four plants and is the market leader. It has factories in Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and India. Carlos is looking to as far as South Africa and Eastern European countries for possible locations.
An architecture dropout
Chan went to Shanghai after Deng Xiao Ping opened up the economy in the early 1990s. Twenty years ago, Liwayway leased two plants with some 400 workers from a state-owned company. He invested $3.5 million in his factory. His products are branded Oishi—reflecting the Japanese word for delicious and Japanese technology.
As the saying goes, if you could sell a product worth one yuan to each Chinese, you would make 1.3 billion yuan (P7.7 billion in Philippine currency).
But China was so poor then, not much of the population could afford even a 50-yuan snack food. So Liwayway invested in technology. “We exported our food manufacturing technology to China from the Philippines,” relates Larry Chan, fourth son of Carlos and now chairman of Liwayway. Carlos is chairman emeritus. And in charge of business development.
Another son, Archie, is in charge of R and D, the food group, and chairman of the Philippine company Liwayway Marketing A daughter, Rinby is in charge of packaging design and development. Eldest son Carlson is in charge of new business. Another son, Ozen is on top of the Philippines and other Asian countries. Carlos dispatched his children to Shanghai to learn and expand the business. They live there.
The Chans are very particular in not having Oishi snack foods labeled junk food. “They are nutritious, health foods, with zero trans-fat,” insists the boyish-looking Larry.
In 1996, Oishi was named a “Shanghai Famous Brand” and in 2001, a “China Famous Brand.” Carlos himself was named an honorary citizen of Shanghai in 2005.
Liwayway was started by Carlos’s parents in 1946, just after the War, repackaging goods like coffee and cornstarch (Liwayway Gawgaw is a long-time bestseller) from the masses. Liwayway means “break of dawn” in Pilipino and is meant to signify hope and optimism.
Liwayway ventured into snack food manufacturing in 1974 with the brand “Oishi.”
Carlos Chan relates that he went into business because the brood was large, eight children, and there was little pie to divide among themselves. The children incorporated Chan C. Bros. in 1963 to make lighting and bathroom fixtures and acrylic products.
Three presidents have named Carlos special envoy to China.
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