Liem
Sieo Liong Liem Sioe Liong, who adopted the Indonesian name Sudono Salim, was born in Haikou in Fujian province of China in 1916. When he was 15, he started a noodle shop. When he was 20, his father died. This was at the time when the Red Army and Kuomintang were enlisting young men to join the holy war. Salim, instead, ran away to Indonesia where his uncle had a provision store. He started peddling coffee, he would mill at night and make little packets out of newspapers and hawk them during the day. Salim’s big break came in 1965 when then President Suharto overthrew Sukarno. He greatly benefitted from his close ties with then Indonesian President Suharto. Sometime in the 1990s, Salim put up Bank Central Asia. In 1997, Bank Central Asia is one of the biggest banks in Indonesia with 788 branches and 8 million customers. The revenues from the bank enabled Salim to set up a noodle, flour, and bread business. He also set up Indomobil Sukses International to make cars, Indocement Tunggal Prakasa to make cement, and resort in Jakarta. He also made significant investments outside Indonesia. He bought QAF, a company that owned a supermarket in Singapore and First Pacific Co in Hongkong. Salim is the First Salim’s bank went into bankruptcy during the East Asian financial crisis in 1998. Anti-Chinese riots destroyed most of Salim’s properties including Bank Central Asia’s branches and Salim’s villa in Jakarta. At this time, Salim moved to Singapore and his son Anthoni took over. Most of the businesses under Salim’s group have loans. The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Company took over 107 Salim group companies. Reports say that over the years, the Salims were able to recover some of their properties taken by the Indonesian government. Currently, Salim’s Indo Food is doing well. Indofood’s flour mill is one of the largest in the world in terms of production capacity in one location. Anthoni Salim sits as chairman of First Pacific Co, (http://www.firstpacific.com) a holding company that includes Indo Food in Indonesia, Communications companies Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company and Smart Communications, Inc., and Metro Pacific which runs 4 nursing schools in the Philippines, among others. They also several projects in West Bengal, Indonesia including the construction of Kolkata West International City. Sources: Liem Sieo Liong. Posted in The Telegraph, Calcutta,
India on September 20, 2005. Retrieved on August 31, 2009 from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050920/asp/opinion/story_5261603.asp Photo credit: http://www.tokohindonesia.com/ensiklopedi/s/sudono-salim/index.shtml  |
Indo Food Sukses Mamur (http://www.indofood.co.id) is known as the
world’s largest instant noodle producer. It is based in Indonesia
and was founded by a man whose very first job was to run a noodle
soup shop. Indo Food is under the Salim conglomerate Salim Group.