The chief executive of Singapore-based Hyflux has become the first woman to win the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Ms Lum, who collected the award in Monte Carlo at the weekend, pipped 48 entrepreneurs, including Ayman Asfari, chief executive of FTSE 100 oil services giant Petrofac and Howard Lutnick, head of investment banking and brokerage business Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 of its 960 New York-based employees in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
She founded Hyflux in 1989 with 20,000 Singapore dollars, which she raised from selling her house and car, and initially rode around on a motorcycle selling water filters and treatment chemicals. The desalinisation supplier is now listed on the Singapore Exchange, has 2,300 employees across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and annual revenues of $450m. Customers included Siemens and Hewlett Packard.
Ms Lum began her career as an entrepreneur by selling fruit on the street to fund her education. She said her triumph showed “there are no difficulties you can’t overcome when you have faced the challenges of hunger and poverty”.
The 50 year-old said the 'membranes’ that the business now uses to treat water – fine filters rather than chemicals – have only become commercially viable in the last five years.
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