The story of Legend
The story of Lu Chuanzhi and how he built Legend into a $2B company by parlaying a $25,000 investment he persisted in getting from Beijing:
At first the government resisted--there was already one state computer company, so surely there was no need for another. Eventually Beijing caved in, giving Liu a license and about $25,000 to set up shop in Hong Kong, initially to distribute foreign-made computers and then, in 1990, to make PCs.
Liu ran the place with an iron fist. "I was a very authoritarian manager," he says. "It was top-down all the way." But he was also smart enough to know what he didn't know. Liu struck deals to distribute Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba products on the mainland, then set about learning from the U.S. and Japanese giants. He sucked up everything he could, he says, "about how to organize sales channels and how to market. HP was our earliest and best teacher."
...Even as he was learning from HP and the rest, Liu had no intention of working for them forever. His vision was to take on the foreigners that then dominated the Chinese market--IBM, Compaq, and HP--by building the capacity to make low-cost PCs, then selling them through the retail network Legend had already built.