Final model

FINAL MODEL

http://files.filefront.com/DM+ARCH1102+EXP3+carson+clut2/;8875502;/fileinfo.html

Carlos Slim

The exterior of the building resembles a staircase which is similar to the way in which Zhang has climbed her way to where she is today.

Carlos Slim’s office is in the shape of a glass sphere, which represents the sun. The sun is the centre of the Solar System and is surrounded by everything. The sun also shines on everything and rises to untouchable heights. (Mr. Slim has accumulated so much power that he is considered untouchable in his native land, a force as great as the state itself.)

Similar to the elevator walls, the walls of Carlos’ office symbolises his desire to monopolise the markets his businesses are involved in.

dining room

The dining room is a combination of the themes and ideas represented in both Carlos and Zhang’s offices. In particular, the glass walls and the ascension to the central dining table.

Final model - Zhang Yin's office

Zhang Yin’s office is mainly made of glass, which signifies the high transparency that Zhang considers is important to her personal character and her business methods.

Zhang’s glass office allows more sunlight to enter, which saves electricity and continues on with her environmentally oriented primary business.

The circular shape of the office also represents the nature of Zhang primary business of paper recycling. The circle is a depiction of the cycle that the paper undertakes, and how Zhang completes the circle by taking the disposed paper and recycling it for reuse.

The ascending levels to Zhang’s office desk shows her continual striving for more power and how she wants to always expand her business.

"My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards," Zhang said emphatically during a short interview in her Hong Kong office. "My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry."

Elevator - Final

Download Link: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=bd8e67daf4a5e4b0a2a4fa279cd818f8

The elevator, similar to the dining table, is circular and made of glass, indicating Zhang Yin’s transparent business morals and her independence, along with the centrality of Carlos Slim in the business world.
In addition to this, the shape of the walls around the elevator is reminiscent of a hand about to grab at something. This represents the way in which Carlos monopolizes the many markets he is involved in.

Dinning table - Final

Download Link : http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=89cc74df4357299da2a4fa279cd818f8

The dining table, which is made of glass, signifies the high transparency that Zhang Yin considers is important to her personal character and her business methods.
(Zhang does not go into detail about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, "I'm an honest businesswoman.")

The dining table is also circular in shape, with Zhang Yin and Carlos Slim sitting in the centre of the table.
The significance of Carlos Slim’s seating position is that it illustrates his own position in the business world. His many companies, which number in the hundreds, are so widespread and diverse that most everyone invariably puts money into his business.
In the midst of all these companies, Carlos Slim is in the very centre, surrounded by everything from his many business ventures, right down to the people who purchase his products. (It's hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in his pocket. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies -- he says he's "lost count" -- in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing. In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico's leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country's annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller's wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)As one Mexico City eatery jokes on its menu: "This restaurant is the only place in Mexico not owned by Carlos Slim.")
Zhang Yin’s central seating position in relation to the circular table shows her independence from other people. Coming from such a modest background, Zhang built her own business and separated herself from the rat race, represented by the circle. (Most of the world's richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton sisters of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L'Oréal cosmetics and BMW.But not Zhang. She started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer.)
The circular shape of the table also represents the nature of Zhang primary business of paper recycling. The circle is a depiction of the cycle that the paper undertakes, and how Zhang completes the circle by taking the disposed paper and recycling it for reuse. ("I remember what a man in the business told me back then," Zhang Yin said. "He said, 'Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.'")

36 custom textures

Drafts

Draft - elevator

Draft - dinning table

Draft - unreal model

18 two points perspective sketches

18 one point perspective sketches

Carlos Slim

The Secrets of the World's Richest Man
Mexico's Carlos Slim makes his billionsthe old-fashioned way: monopolies
By DAVID LUHNOWAugust 4, 2007; Page A1
(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
Mexico City
Carlos Slim is Mexico's Mr. Monopoly.

It's hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in his pocket. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies -- he says he's "lost count" -- in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing. In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico's leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country's annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller's wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)

As one Mexico City eatery jokes on its menu: "This restaurant is the only place in Mexico not owned by Carlos Slim."
Mr. Slim's fortune has grown faster than any in the world during the past two years, rising by more than $20 billion to about $60 billion currently. While the market value of his stake in publicly traded companies could decline at any time, at the moment he is probably wealthier than Bill Gates, whom Forbes magazine estimated at $56 billion last March. This would mark the first time that a person from the developing world held the top spot since Forbes started tracking the wealthy outside the U.S. in the 1990s.
"It's not a competition," Mr. Slim said in a recent interview, fiddling with an unlit Cuban cigar in a second-story office decorated with 19th century Mexican landscape paintings. A relatively modest man who wears ties from his own stores, the mogul says he doesn't feel any richer just because he is wealthier on paper.
How did a Mexican son of Lebanese immigrants rise to such heights? By putting together monopolies, much like John D. Rockefeller did when he developed a stranglehold on refining oil in the industrial era. In the post-industrial world, Mr. Slim has a stranglehold on Mexico's telephones. His Teléfonos de México SAB and its cellphone affiliate Telcel have 92% of all fixed-lines and 73% of all cellphones. As Mr. Rockefeller did before him, Mr. Slim has accumulated so much power that he is considered untouchable in his native land, a force as great as the state itself.
The portly Mr. Slim is a study in contradiction. He says he likes competition in business, but blocks it at every turn. He loves talking about technology, but doesn't use a computer and prefers pen and paper. He hosts everyone from Bill Clinton to author Gabriel García Márquez at his Mexico City mansion, but is provincial in many ways, doesn't travel widely, and proudly says he owns no homes outside of Mexico. In a country of soccer fans, he likes baseball. He roots for the sport's richest team, the New York Yankees.
INTERVIEW EXCERPTS

"This isn't a competition. Being a businessman isn't about that kind of competition. It's a competition for the marketplace."
-- Carlos Slim, in a discussion with The Wall Street Journal. Read the edited excerpts.
Admirers say the hard-charging Mr. Slim, an insomniac who stays up late reading history and has a fondness for reading about Ghengis Khan and his deceptive military strategies, embodies Mexico's potential to become a Latin tiger. His thrift in both his businesses and personal life is a model of restraint in a region where flamboyant Latin American business tycoons build lavish corporate headquarters and fly to Africa on hunting jaunts.
To critics, however, Mr. Slim's rise says a lot about Mexico's deepest problems, including the gap between rich and poor. The latest U.N. rankings place Mexico at 103 out of 126 nations measured in terms of equality. During the past two years, Mr. Slim has made about $27 million a day, while a fifth of the country gets by on less than $2 a day.
"It's like the U.S. and the robber barons in the 1890s. Only Slim is Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan all rolled up into one person," says David Martínez, a Mexican investor who lives in Manhattan.
Monopolies have long been a feature of Mexico's economy. But in the past, politicians acted as a brake on big business to ensure that the business class didn't threaten their power. But political control faded in the 1990s with the privatization of much of the economy and the slow death of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held power for 71 years until 2000.
"It is surprising how big companies have captured the Mexican state. This is a risk to our democracy, and is suffocating our economy," says Eduardo Perez Motta, the country's antitrust chief.
As the face of the new elite, Mr. Slim presents an acute challenge for the country's young president, Felipe Calderón. He must decide whether to try and rein in Mr. Slim despite the mogul's standing as the country's largest private employer and taxpayer. Congress routinely kills legislation that threatens his interests, and his firms account for a chunk of the nation's advertising revenue, making the media reluctant to criticize him.
During the past few months, Mr. Calderón has looked to cut a backdoor deal with Mr. Slim. In a series of face-to face meetings -- the details of which have surfaced for the first time -- the president has tried to convince Mr. Slim to accept greater competition, according to people familiar with the talks. The government holds an important card: Mr. Slim can't offer video on his network -- a big potential market -- without government approval.
But even some within Mr. Calderón's camp privately say the closed-door talks play into Mr. Slim's hands by letting him circumvent the country's regulators, underscoring the weakness of Mexico's democratic institutions. Unless Mr. Calderón extracts big concessions from the mogul, they say, he may become too powerful to control. For his part, Mr. Slim says that his companies are "in constant contact" with regulators, but played down the notion of a secret negotiation.
A talkative man who is generally avuncular but who can easily lose his temper, Mr. Slim rejects the monopolist label. "I like competition. We need more competition," he says, sipping a Diet Coke. He stressed that many of his companies operate in competitive markets, and pointed out that Mexico accounts for only a third of sales at his cellphone company América Móvil SAB, which has clients from San Francisco to Sao Paolo.
Mr. Slim's strategy has been consistent over his long career: Buy companies on the cheap, whip them into shape, and ruthlessly drive competitors out of business. After Mr. Slim got control of Telmex in 1990, he quickly cornered the market for copper cables used by Telmex for telephone wires. He bought one of the two main suppliers and made sure Telmex didn't buy any cable from the other big supplier, eventually prompting the owners to sell the company to him.
His control of Mexico's telephone system has slowed the nation's development. While telephones have long been standard in any American home, only about half of Mexican homes have them. Only 4% of Mexicans have broadband access. Mexican consumers and businesses also pay above-average prices for telephone calls, according to the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development.
Mr. Slim agrees that many industries in Mexico are dominated by big companies. But he sees no harm as long as they offer good service and prices. "If a beer in Mexico costs 1 peso and in the U.S. it costs 2 pesos, then I don't see the problem," he says.
Despite countless measures over the years that show his companies charge high prices, Mr. Slim steadfastly rejects that notion. During an interview, he orders an aide to fetch his own telephone bills. "See? We charge $14 per month for basic phone rental, cheaper than the U.S.," he says, pulling up a seat next to the reporter. That may be so, but additional fees in Mexico make most phone bills more expensive than in the U.S. Mr. Slim's total phone bill at his own house was a whopping $470 last month. "I have a lot of maids and my sons make calls," he says.
Mr. Slim says his success comes from spotting opportunity early, something he learned in part from reading futurist writer Alvin Toffler, who wrote the best-seller "Future Shock" in the 1970s, and who sends the mogul manuscripts to review. Pulling a dog-eared copy of Mr. Toffler's last book, "Revolutionary Wealth," Mr. Slim leafs through it and shows off his comments in the margins. "Some of his numbers were out of date," he mutters.
Mr. Toffler says he first met Mr. Slim on a trip to Mexico in 1993. Mr. Slim approached him after a speech, surrounded by his family and carrying one of Mr. Toffler's books, heavily underlined. The two have been friends ever since. "If you didn't know he was the richest guy in the world, you'd just think he was a likeable and intelligent guy," says Mr. Toffler.
The fifth of six children, Mr. Slim was born wealthy. His father, Julian Slim, made his fortune on a general store in downtown Mexico City called "The Orient Star." His father died when Mr. Slim was only 13.
Early on, Mr. Slim showed an aptitude for numbers that would help his career. He taught algebra at Mexico's largest public university while finishing his thesis, titled "Applications of Linear Theory in Civil Engineering." His love of numbers also drew him to baseball, a lifelong hobby. "In baseball...numbers talk," he once wrote. Even today, he enjoys discussing baseball, telling a reporter that slugger Barry Bonds should be remembered more for his walk ratio than his home runs.
After college, Mr. Slim and some friends became stockbrokers in the country's fledgling market. Trading by day and playing dominoes by night, the clique became known as "Los Casabolseros," or "The Stock Market Boys." Despite the success, friends say Mr. Slim, less of a party boy and more private than the rest, wanted to run companies rather than trade. "He never liked money as much as the rest of us. He just wanted to be a good businessman," says Enrique Trigueros, one of the casabolseros.
Mr. Slim soon got his chance. After turning around a soft-drink company and a printing firm in the late 1960s and mid 1970s, he made his first big move in 1981, buying a big stake in Mexico's second-biggest tobacco company, Cigatam, maker of Marlboro cigarettes in Mexico. The company generated the cash Mr. Slim needed to go on a buying spree.
A good time to buy came in 1982, a year that would shape Mr. Slim's destiny. That year, the collapsing price of oil threw Mexico into a tailspin. When departing president José López Portillo nationalized Mexico's banks, the traditional business elite feared the country was becoming socialist, and ran for the exits. Companies were selling for as little as 5% of their book value. Mr. Slim picked up dozens of leading firms for bargain-basement prices, a move that paid off when the economy recovered in the following years. He bought Mexico's largest insurer, Seguros de México, for $44 million. Today, the company is worth at least $2.5 billion.
"Countries don't go broke," an unflappable Mr. Slim told friends at the time. Indeed, Mr. Slim always says his inspiration to invest during the downturn came from his father, who bought out his partner in their general store during the worst days of the 1910-1917 Mexican revolution -- a bet that made his father a fortune when the fighting ended.
Mr. Slim still spots good values. From 2002 to 2004, he amassed a 13% stake in bankrupt carrier MCI, later selling it to Verizon Communications Corp. for $1.3 billion. "He has never overpaid for anything," says Hector Aguilar Camín, a historian and friend. While the pair were on holiday in Venice, Mr. Slim once haggled with a store owner for several hours to get a $10 discount on a tie.
Despite his abilities, many here believe his biggest break was the rise to power in 1988 of Carlos Salinas, a Harvard-educated technocrat bent on modernizing the country. The two men had struck up a friendship in the mid-1980s, and Mr. Salinas spoke of Mr. Slim as the country's brightest young businessman. Local wags dubbed the pair "Carlos and Charlies," after a popular local restaurant chain.
Under Mr. Salinas, hundreds of state companies were sold, including Telmex in 1990. Mr. Slim, together with Southwestern Bell and France Telecom, won the bid over one of his closest friends, Roberto Hernandez, who got together with GTE Corp. Mr. Hernandez later suggested the auction was rigged, something both Mr. Slim and Mr. Salinas have long denied. Regardless of whether there was favoritism in the sale of Telmex, the privatization process created a new class of super-rich in Mexico. In 1991, the country had two billionaires on the Forbes list. By 1994, at the end of Mr. Salinas's six-year term, there were 24. The richest of them all was Mr. Slim.
In retrospect, it is easy to see why Messrs. Slim and Hernandez considered Telmex a prize worth losing their friendship. Although countries like Brazil and the U.S. broke up state monopolies into a number of competing firms, Mexico sold its monopoly intact, barring competition during the first six years. And while countries like the U.S. initially barred local "baby bell" carriers from offering long-distance and cellular service in their same area, Telmex got to do all three at once, and across the entire country. Indeed, it won the only nationwide cellular-telephone concession, while rivals had to settle for concessions that were limited to certain regions. When competition was allowed in long distance, foreign carriers were limited to a minority stake in the fixed-line business. Mexico didn't even bother to set up a telephone regulator until three years after the sale.
Dan Crawford was one of those who took on Mr. Slim and lost. In 1995, the California native became chief operating officer of Avantel, a long-distance company partly owned by MCI and the bank of Mr. Hernandez, Mr. Slim's erstwhile friend. Avantel spent around $1 billion building a new network, but it soon ran into trouble trying to connect to Telmex's network -- something it needed to complete calls to and from Telmex clients. Telmex executives simply ignored phone calls or failed to turn up for meetings, Mr. Crawford recalls.
When Telmex did connect the calls nearly a year later, the price was so high that Avantel paid 70 cents of every dollar it made to Mr. Slim's company, according to Mr. Crawford. When Avantel took Telmex to court for monopolistic practices, Telmex responded by asking a judge to issue an arrest warrant for Avantel's top lawyer in Mexico, Luis Mancera, on trumped up charges, Mr. Crawford says. Mr. Slim confirms the story, but says a Telmex lawyer acted rashly, and that the judicial proceeding was dropped. Mr. Mancera declined to comment.
"Slim is very aggressive," says Mr. Crawford, who recently retired from MCI. Avantel eventually defaulted on its debts in 2001, much of which were scooped up by Mr. Slim and later sold for a profit. Avantel was sold recently to another Mexican firm for $485 million -- a fraction of what it invested in Mexico.
For his part, Mr. Slim says Avantel and others mistakenly focused on the long-distance market, which was in decline, rather than wireless, which was growing.
It hasn't been much easier taking on Mr. Slim in the wireless market either. In 2004, Spain's Telefónica SA began selling handsets at a loss here to build market share. But it soon realized that tens of thousands of phones were purchased but never used. According to a case currently at Mexico's antitrust agency, Telefónica says that Telcel distributors bought the phones to keep them off the market, in some cases swapping the phone's existing chip with their own and reselling the handset.
When asked about this practice, Mr. Slim says "It could be. That happens to all of us. If you sell something for $50 or $20 that costs $100, someone's going to buy it." His spokesman and son-in-law, Arturo Elías, says the distributors acted without Telcel's knowledge.
Attempts to regulate Mr. Slim's companies have largely failed over the years. Mexico's telephone regulator, Cofetel, was so weak in the 1990s that Telmex's rivals dubbed it "Cofetelmex." When the regulator did try to act, Mr. Slim's lawyers blocked it in the country's Byzantine courts.
The Telmex chief also had friends in high places. Vicente Fox, Mexico's first opposition president when he won in 2000, tapped a former Telmex employee, Pedro Cerisola, to be his minister of communications and transport. During his tenure, Mr. Cerisola rarely moved against Telmex, say executives from rival telephone companies. Mr. Cerisola declined to comment.
Using money from his telephone empire, Mr. Slim has expanded into Latin American markets as well as new industries in Mexico. His cellphone company América Móvil has 124 million customers and operates in more than a dozen Latin American nations. In Mexico, he has focused on industries that depend on government contracts. His new construction company, Ideal SAB, is currently bidding to run some of Mexico's biggest highways. His new oil-services company recently built the country's biggest oil platform.
Some of Mexico's business leaders say in private that they feel Mr. Slim has grown too greedy. The death of his wife, Soumaya, from kidney disease in 1999 left him without an anchor, says Mr. Trigueros, Mr. Slim's friend from his stockbroker days. "She was a special woman, the kind who keeps a guy in line. Nowadays, he only has business to think about," he says.
Mr. Slim's empire is so vast here now that doing business without him can be difficult. Two years ago, Hutchison Port Holdings and U.S. railroad Union Pacific teamed up to bid on a $6 billion port and railway in Baja California to compete with Long Beach port. But Mr. Slim felt the project had been arranged behind closed doors and was against the idea of the country's biggest project going to foreigners. He made his feelings known to the Baja California governor and the project was stalled. Mr. Slim has since worked to put together a rival consortium, which includes Mexican rail company Grupo Mexico and U.S. railroad Burlington-Northern. He says his potential bid is a better option for the country because the railroad will run along Mexico's north and help spur development. Union Pacific and Hutchison both declined to comment.
Mr. Slim has recently given more money to philanthropy, but he has often said his most important legacy is his family. In 2000, a few years after heart surgery, he put his sons and sons-in-law in charge of his businesses. He also started a group called "Fathers and Sons" that invites Latin American billionaires and their heirs for annual meetings, where they sip fine wines and attend seminars like "How to Run a Family Business."
There is no obvious successor to the patriarch's empire. That gives some Mexican officials hope that one day the state can regulate his companies. Says one high-ranking official: "When Slim dies, we can finally regulate his kids."
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
About half of Mexican homes have telephone lines, according to the World Bank. This article about Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim incorrectly said only 20% of Mexican homes have phone lines. After Mr. Slim got control of Telmex in 1990, he bought a controlling stake in one of two main suppliers of copper cables used by Telmex for telephone wires, making sure Telmex didn't buy any cable from the other big supplier. That eventually prompted the owners of the rival firm to sell the company at a distressed price to a U.S. company. This article incorrectly says Mr. Slim bought the rival company.

link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118615255900587380.html?mod=home_we_banner_left

Zhang Yin

HONG KONG: Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge Caravan minivan, begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper.

She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper-trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China's chronic paper shortages.

"I remember what a man in the business told me back then," Zhang Yin said. "He said, 'Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.'"

Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, she is now richer than virtually any other woman anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and the chief executive of eBay, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more.

Her companies take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ship it to China and recycle it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that are packed with toys, electronics and furniture that are stamped "Made in China" and then often shipped right back across the ocean to Western consumers.

After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.

Late last year, Forbes magazine named Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the Italian clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband.

Most of the world's richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton sisters of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L'Oréal cosmetics and BMW.

But not Zhang. She started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world's paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan, just outside Hong Kong, and the other based in Los Angeles.

"She's a visionary," said Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her large paper company list shares in Hong Kong. "She doesn't mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company."

That company, Nine Dragons Paper, is now the biggest paper maker in China. It raised nearly $500 million when it went public in Hong Kong last March.

Since then, shares of Nine Dragons have quadrupled, giving the company a market value of more than $5 billion. The Zhang family controls 72 percent of the company, which makes it one of the richest families in China.

Zhang's smaller venture, America Chung Nam, which is based in Los Angeles, is one of the world's biggest paper trading companies, with ties to recycling yards in New York, Chicago and California.

No other U.S. company sends so much material to China, in as many containers, as America Chung Nam, which was named the top U.S. exporter to China by volume for the fifth consecutive year in 2005, according to Piers Global Intelligence, which tracks import and export data.

Now, with the paper industry shifting to China, where labor and land are cheaper, Zhang and Nine Dragons are vowing to take on the world's global paper giants, like International Paper, Weyerhauser and Smurfit Stone.

"My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards," Zhang said emphatically during a short interview in her Hong Kong office. "My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry."

Zhang rarely grants interviews, and when she does, they are brief and controlled by an army of handlers.

Zhang does not go into detail about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, "I'm an honest businesswoman."

Zhang was the oldest of eight children born into a military family from northern Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian border. During the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, her father was sent to prison, like millions of others who were branded "counterrevolutionaries" or "capitalist roaders."

When the Cultural Revolution came to a close in 1976, her father was released from prison and "rehabilitated." She went to work as an accountant.

After economic change got under way in China in the early 1980s, she moved to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, one of the first areas in China allowed to experiment with capitalism. There she started working for a foreign-Chinese joint venture paper trading company.

In 1985, she ventured to Hong Kong, which was then still a British colony. Ng Weiting, who was her partner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, says Zhang was driven and tough and had figured out how to get the best performance out of those who worked for her.

"When her employees asked for a pay raise, she would grant it if it was reasonable," he recalled. "But when her employees made mistakes, she would criticize them severely. She made it clear when to reward and when to punish."

Analysts say Zhang's ebullient personality made her a great saleswoman and a savvy deal maker.

There were occasional threats from competitors, but being a woman was not a problem, Zhang said.

"Actually, I didn't find it difficult," she said. "I found men respected me."

After Hong Kong's paper market proved too small for her ambitions, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and married for the second time, to Liu Ming Chung, who was born in Taiwan, grew up in Brazil and is fluent in English.

Together, they formed America Chung Nam. At the time, China's fast- growing economy was suffering from shortages of raw materials, and the country began looking overseas for scrap metal and used paper. Zhang Yin was one of the first to sell scrap paper to China.

China's own paper products are poor quality, often made from grass, bamboo or rice stalks. Most paper made in the United States and Europe is derived from wood pulp.

America Chung Nam quickly made deals with American scrap yards and began shipping huge containers of paper back to China. The demand grew so fast that in 1995, Zhang (who also goes by her Hong Kong name, Cheung Yan) returned to China to found Nine Dragons, opening her first paper making facility in Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub in the bustling Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong. Liu now is the chief executive; Zhang is the chairwoman.

A decade later, the company has 11 giant paper making machines, 5,300 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and a huge new facility under construction in the country's other booming export hub, the Yangtze River Delta area near Shanghai. Reported profit last year rose 349 percent to $175 million.

Nine Dragons is now one of the fastest growing paper companies, and yet it says it cannot keep up with demand for container board, the material used to make boxes, because of the booming growth in the Chinese economy and exports.

Foreign paper companies have been slow to build a sizable manufacturing base in China, Analysts doubt they will catch up any time soon. And Chinese manufacturers have advantages. They burn cheap coal rather than clean but expensive natural gas. And they are capitalizing on less expensive labor and the newest machinery, while paper makers in the United States and Europe are often using less efficient machines from the 1970s and 1980s.

"It's very difficult for U.S. companies to get into this business now," said Woo at BNP Paribas. "I heard five or six years ago they looked at opportunities but they didn't do anything.

"Right now," Woo added, "the largest globally is Smurfit Stone. Weyerhauser is No. 2. By 2008, Nine Dragons could be No. 1."

Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors.

But Zhang vigorously defends the appointment, saying her son is qualified and Nine Dragons is, after all, a family company. She has a second son in high school. And her younger brother, Zhang Chang Fei, is the company's deputy chief executive.

Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing.

She has not lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the Queen of Trash, she doesn't disown the title. But, she said, "Some day, I'd like to be known as the queen of containerboards."

Link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/15/business/trash.php

Ratan Tata

Corus takeover: Who is Ratan Tata?

India's Tata Steel has won the battle to take over the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus by making a £5.75bn ($11.3bn) bid.
Tata chairman Ratan Tata is not among the Forbes' list of 40 richest Indians around the world.
His sprawling business empire is no longer the largest among privately-owned Indian groups.
He's not even considered the most powerful businessman in India.
More importantly, there's still a lack of clarity about who'll be his successor after his planned retirement in 2012.
But he's one of the most respected corporate chieftains in India.
And when London-based steelmaker Corus agreed to his takeover bid in October, he had arrived on the global arena.
Aggressive and ambitious
That's a short snapshot of Ratan Tata, 69, who controls the $22bn Tata group, which includes 96 companies manufacturing a range of products from automobiles to watches, steel to fertilisers.
The takeover - the largest by any Indian company - marks yet another transformation in the corporate image of Ratan Tata during his 15 years' stint as the group chairman.
Today, the smooth, suave, and introvert Ratan is being seen as an aggressive and ambitious businessman, whose strategic vision has shifted from local to global.

This change started in February 2000, when Tata Tea purchased the UK-based Tetley for over $400m. In the financial year 2005-06, the group made 14 acquisitions (worth nearly $1.5bn).
In a recent interview to an Indian magazine, Ratan Tata said: "We were very obsessed with ourselves in India. So, I have felt for some time that we didn't need to be that."
Today, nearly a third of group revenues, some $6.7bn, comes from overseas markets.
"I think we've only just begun. If we stay in India, we'll be at a competitive disadvantage," Alan Rosling, director, Tata Sons, which is the group's holding company, told Reuters recently.
This realisation has struck many Indian promoters and, after the Tata-Corus deal, India's Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) outflows will exceed FDI inflows in the first seven months of this financial year.
But it hasn't been a smooth ride for Ratan Tata. When he became the chairman in 1991, he was seen as a pushover by the group companies' CEOs, who lorded over their entities.
He had to battle it out with these satraps, who treated their companies as their fiefdoms. So, the new chairman eased out CEOs like Rusi Mody (of Tata Steel) and Ajit Kerkar (Indian Hotels).
Revamps
In the late 1990s, two of the top firms, Tata Steel and Tata Motors went through tumultuous crises and were saddled with huge losses.

Ratan revamped the operations of Tata Steel and made it one of the lowest-cost producers in the world.
He made the critics eat their own words, when he launched India's first indigenous car, Indica, which turned around Tata Motors' fortunes.
As the group entered the 21st Century, Ratan Tata was obsessed with four critical issues.
The first was to globalise his group's operations, where he has succeeded to a certain extent.
The second was to safeguard his companies against possible hostile takeovers after the London-based Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, purchased the Luxembourg-based Arcelor early in 2006 to become the world's largest steelmaker, and announced his ambitious plans in India.
So, to thwart any threats, Tata decided to up his stakes in most of the group companies.
Ratan Tata's most important concern, however, was to protect his top lines and bottom lines in the face of ever-increasing competition from domestic and global players.
To achieve this objective, he had no option but to become aggressive, a quality that helped him in other areas.
Today, the group, which was seen as risk-averse and cautious, has no qualms about taking on competitors publicly - be it in areas of policy-making, products launched or marketing tactics.
Staying on
Finally, the unmarried Ratan Tata had to look for a successor.
There were several candidates - including his step-brother, Noel - but none of them had an established track record. Some of them didn't have the character to carry on the legacy of a group that's synonymous with reliability of products, honesty, integrity and public service.

When he couldn't find a credible contender, Tata decided to take the bull by the horns and postponed his retirement.
Last year, the retirement age for non-executive directors of Tata Sons, the holding company, was raised from 70 to 75 years.
Thanks to that, Tata, a non-executive director, who was to retire in 2007, got a five-year extension.
Now it appears it is time for Ratan Tata to establish himself on the global map. The Corus buyout makes Tata Steel the world's fifth largest steelmaker.
But it needs to play the catch-up game with Mittal. Tata has to do the same with Mukesh Ambani, the promoter of India's largest private sector firm, Reliance Industries, which aims to be among the top 100 in the Fortune 500 list.
Ratan Tata has a long way to go before he can bid farewell (or "tata" to use the Hindi word) to the world of work.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6071090.stm

Electroliquid Aggregation:
The object and color in the materials around us actually has a big effect on how important we feel the future is.

UT2004 can be downloaded from
http://hosted.filefront.com/cheungkaho/

Red, green, yellow and dark these four colors are mainly used on these two spaces. Red is used to denote danger, green deonotes balance, yellow is associated with caution and the color of dark is unsafe.

These two images (above and below) are taken from the meeting place which is very dark.
When people in the dark place, people tend to move from dark to light and in color psychology, green denotes comfort and balance

The shiny green ramp which its texture and color of the floors signify "high tech" and the future with its similarity to computer chips can be seen clearly in the very dark space. The importance of the future as the ramp shines a light on everything that surrounds it.

36 custom textures