Profile: From backyard to big gun

In a market dominated by multinational manufacturing giants, Cornel Ung has grown Optima from a small PC dealership in West Ryde, Sydney, to a large ASX-listed Australian computer manufacturer.

Ung migrated from Macau in 1980. It wasn’t until he was studying at Macquarie University in 1986 that his passion for technology would become a commercial reality. An enterprising young man, he started from the bottom, building computers for fellow students while studying at Macquarie University in 1986. He was 24 years old.

“I was selling computers in the uni -- advertising on the uni noticeboard in each of the faculties. I was doing OK, doing seven to 10 units per week -- it was good income, pocket money,” he says.

After finishing university in 1988, Ung looked for a job in the computer industry and was encouraged by one of his local manufacturers to set up his own business. He found a location and started a business in 1989 dubbed Australian Budget Computer. “At that time, we were doing extremely well with ads in the paper and we were generating a lot of business from a small retail shop.”

The business was healthy and he was enjoying good profits, but he was not satisfied. “After three months, I decided to bring in a container load [of stock] from overseas. That was a big challenge, because I didn’t have the funding,” Ung says.

He started assembling computers at the back of the Sydney shop. “After one year with the shop, we decided we had a choice. To open more retail shops or move into true manufacturing, setting up a production facility, providing a distribution network for our resellers -- so I decided to become manufacturer.”

“That was 1990.We moved the business to Rydalmere. We had one building to start with and after three years, we expanded to three buildings.”

“Our business was growing really fast -- from 20, 30 to 500 active dealers. That’s how the business started. We changed the name to Optima Computer Technology in 1990.”

Since then, Optima has grown at rates of between 30 and 40 percent every year and despite the downturn of the late 1990s, it managed to survive.

It was even the victim of a fire at its building in 1989. “We had offsite tape and insurance cover. People thought “Optima is gone!” he says. Today it has 140 staff and would expect that number to grow to between 160 and 180 people next financial year. It also employs around 50 casual staff in its production area.

Optima won its first government contract in 1996 with the Department of Public Works and a move into the state education market came in 1997 when it cracked a deal supplying boxes to the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET). “Because of that business we grew significantly.”

At that time, the [education] rollout was 12,000 to 15,000 PCs. “We started with a 10 percent market share of that contract and at one stage our share went up to 40 percent so we grew significantly over the past few years. At the moment we’ve got around 20 percent [4000 PCs]. The department gave a large chunk of the business to IBM,” he says.

Today, government sales make up 50 percent of Optima’s business, predominantly in NSW. This month, it completed a $5 million rollout of 3300 desktops and 400 notebooks for DET.

The company was given four weeks to supply the machines to every state school in the Hunter/Central Coast region. DET purchased the supplier’s WorkPro 7000 series units based on Intel’s 915G chipset. Due to the fact that Optima is focused on the NSW Government and builds from a production facility in Sydney’s Homebush Bay, it does not come up against the likes of builders such as Ipex, which focus more on Federal Government business, Ung says.

“We are not really focused on Federal Government, except the Department of Defence, which is our customer. Between 2002 and 2003, we sold 25,000 PCs and in 2004 we delivered 6500 to them.”

“At the moment we are waiting for the contract to [renew] soon, so that could be a few more thousand units we could ship to Defence,” he says.

While it is strong in NSW Government, 30 percent of its sales are derived from the regional reseller channel and the remaining 20 percent from retail sales with mass merchants. The company builds computers for retailer the Leading Edge Group, which has a strong regional presence and would look to add a few more retailers to its books next financial year, Ung says.