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Mr Sim Wong Hoo
Sim Wong Hoo, 47, is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Singapore-based Creative Technology Ltd, (Nasdaq: CREAF) an internationally known provider of digital entertainment products and peripherals for personal computers. Creative is best known for its pace-setting Sound Blaster audio card, the brainchild of Sim Wong Hoo.
Sim Wong Hoo has won accolades continuously from industry and government for his prolific innovations. This includes his winning Singapore’s Public Star Medal Bintang Bakti Masyarakat in 2001 for his outstanding achievements in the business field; being named in second spot as Asia’s Businessman of the Year in January 2001 by Fortune Magazine; winning the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from organisers of the European DVD summit in April 2000; and by being appointed Chairman of Singapore’s Technopreneurship 21 Private Sector Committee in March 1999.
Trained as an electronics engineer in Singapore’s Ngee Ann Technical College (now known as Ngee Ann Polytechnic), Sim began his career in the private engineering sector after graduating with a diploma in Electrical & Electronics Engineering in 1975. In 1981, with an initial capital of US$6,000, Sim founded Creative Technology to realize his vision of building a personal computer that could talk, sing and play music, besides crunching numbers.
Creative rolled out its first multilingual, multimedia PC named Cubic CT in 1986, and the 12-voice stereo Creative Music System in 1987. At Comdex in November 1989, the Sound Blaster® audio card was launched and became a runaway success. With the goal of enhancing the PC experience for its customers, Creative’s product line quickly proliferated to include multimedia upgrade kit solutions, video cards, high-end sound cards with wavetable synthesis, desktop videoconferencing, and Chinese processing software. This focus, combined with an extensive channel strategy and strong retail presence, has enabled Creative to remain at the forefront of the industry.
Creative has moved into another new market segment that it is again pioneering – the Personal Digital Entertainment (PDE) product market. Spearheaded by the overwhelmingly popular NOMAD Jukebox portable digital audio player, the PDE line would be the focus of the company in this decade.
Creative currently employs more than 4,600 employees worldwide. Creative was listed on the US NASDAQ stock exchange in the summer of 1992, making Creative the first true-blue Singapore firm to list on NASDAQ. Not surprisingly, in January 1993 the Singapore business community bestowed the prestigious Businessman of the Year Award 1992 to Sim Wong Hoo.
The Sound Blaster® Extigy, the first external Sound Blaster in Creative’s history, which was launched in January 2002 at the prestigious US based exhibition CES, was featured as the ‘Top Picks of CES‘ by both ZDNET and CNET.
Sim Wong Hoo richly deserves to win the Person of the Year Award.
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