Kenny Yap Kim Lee (Chinese: 叶金利; pinyin: Yè Jīnlì), popularly known as “Kenny the Fish”,[1] is the executive chairman of Qian Hu Corporation, an ornamental fish specialist company founded in Singapore.[2]
Yap was conferred the Singapore Youth Award for Entrepreneurship in 1998. He also received Spring Singapore’s International Management Action Award 2000. He was named one of the 50 stars of Asia by Business Week in 2001, and went on to receive the Yazhou Zhoukan Young Chinese Entrepreneur Award 2002 and the Ernst & Young Services Entrepreneur Award 2003, among other accolades.[3]
Education
editYap graduated with a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from Singapore Polytechnic in 1985. He later graduated from Ohio State University with a 1st Class Honours degree in Business Administration.[4]
Career
editReflecting on his family's early challenges in fish-farming, including the death of thousands of expensive tropical fish, Yap told Forbes in 2010: "We basically had no idea what we were doing." That was when the family was starting out in fish-farming 25 years earlier.
By 2010, the Qian Hu Corp, of which Yap was the executive chairman, was one of the biggest exporters of tropical fish in the world and operated a dozen stores around Asia.[5]
Quote
edit- "We knew that we were small fish. Small fish have to swim together to survive. Without my four brothers and two cousins, I don’t think there would be a Kenny Yap." — Kenny Yap
References
edit- ^ "Singapore's Mr Fish: I'm a big fish in a small pond". BBC News. 14 September 2014. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
- ^ Yang, Huiwen (4 April 2009). "Kenny the Fish stays buoyant". The Straits Times. Archived from the original on 8 April 2009. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
- ^ "The Distinguished Business Leader Series by OSU - Mr Kenny Yap" (Press release). Overseas Singaporean Unit, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singaport. Archived from the original on 18 February 2012. Retrieved 16 July 2009.
- ^ Kenny Yap, EO Asia, archived from the original on 14 April 2013, retrieved 18 January 2013
- ^ Frazier, Donald. "Swimming Upstream". Forbes. Retrieved 16 November 2023.
External links
edit- Kenny Yap's E-book, The Rise of An Asian Entrepreneur Archived 11 January 2019 at the Wayback Machine
- Kenny Yap - Business Week review
- Kenny Yap's profile
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