1) How did you come to deal with this business and why technology in particular?   

It is an opportunity that existed during 1984/1985. I was working with an Australian company doing similar business of what I’m doing now and the manufacturer was happy with what we’re doing but they want to expand the market bigger.

So they encouraged us to come out to set up business on our own and that’s how it was started until now.

 2) Who is your target audience and what other unexplored areas do you aim to explore?

Anyone that can use a pen, that is my market. So need not be just in the creative industry, like banks, hospitals, they’re also using it. Schools, other than teaching design, they used it as a teaching tool. In the past, people always look at it, “This is a crafting tablet.” But we don’t look at it as a crafting tablet, we look at it as a tablet with cordless pen input. Whatever your imagination, whatever can be used using a cordless pen, that’s our market.

 3) What has your company done so far to support our local digital arts industry?

I first started selling this tablet just to give illustrations. 12 inches by 12 inches tablet, it will cost about $2000 then. But now, you can get it for a few hundred dollars. So what I’m trying to say is, at that time in Singapore especially, creative design industries are not very well-developed. So if we want to get into this business, we need to do a lot of training – with schools, with the industry, with associations and so on. So we’re consistently working with government agencies and associations such as what was known as IDA at that time. We work very closely with them to provide education and digital arts.

We also play an active role in sponsoring for animations, photography and all kinds of competitions related to digital arts.

4) What are your thoughts on the future of your company?

You can see that people cannot live without a phone nowadays, where technology had kept on improving and Singapore is moving towards being a “Smart Nation”. In the past, there are a lot of changes that may take 5 – 10 years but I foresee that in the near future, you will see a lot more ground-breaking changes in technology.

We also need to work with Wacom and the rest of the industry to tap on their feedback to see what are the changes that we may see. Of course from a business point of view, we need to grab new technology, solutions and products to fit into our business. 

We cannot always run the way we run. If we continue to run the way we run thirty years ago, I will not be here today.