Olivia Lum, founder and chief executive of water treatment firm Hyflux Ltd., is churning out big bucks by offering technology that can purify water from rivers and seas on a commercial scale.

Hyflux also makes an appliance that can extract moisture from the air and turn it into drinking water in a home or workplace.

Using advanced membrane technology to screen out water impurities, the company has grown from humble beginnings in 1989, with only a seed capital of 20,000 Singapore dollars (12,000 US dollars), into a publicly listed firm now worth 487 million dollars.

Hyflux has begun construction of a 200 million dollar seawater purification plant here in Singapore's first attempt to tap the ocean surrounding the island to reduce its dependence on imported water from Malaysia.

It also has investments in water treatment plants in China and plans to bid for the right to build and manage Singapore's fifth plant that will convert water flushed from sewers into potable water.

The growth potential for water treatment companies such as Hyflux in the Asia-Pacific region is enormous, experts say.

As rivers and other sources become more polluted, there will be a growing demand to purify raw water for drinking and industrial purposes using safer and more technologically advanced methods, Lum said in an interview.

A report by the Asian Development Bank says 830 million people living in the region's developing countries do not have safe drinking water and more than two billion lack sanitation facilities.

The shortage has resulted in a high rate of water-borne diseases and deaths, it said, warning water scarcity will also affect food security in some parts of the region and could increase tensions between countries sharing the water resources.

"As people see that they will not be able to use the traditional method of purifying water from rivers because of pollution, the traditional method can no longer give the kind of comfort level in terms of quality, in terms of efficiency," Lum said.

Lum, 42, said her company's main focus will be in China, where it operates four water treatment plants and is building a fifth one.

Forty-four percent of Hyflux's revenues in the last fiscal year came from its China operations.

With its foothold in China, Hyflux is setting up a distribution network in Asia and the Middle East to market its latest product called Dragonfly, an electrical appliance that decondenses air moisture to produce drinking water.

A membrane system and an ultra-violet lamp inside the machine purifies the water, which is dispensed either hot or cold.

The air-to-water machine, costing just over 1,000 US dollars, will compete with bottled water as a low-cost alternative.

Lum's story is a powerful, rags-to-riches tale of how an impoverished village woman from neighbouring Malaysia made it big in the Singapore and the Asian corporate world through a never-say-die attitude.

Abandoned when she was a baby, Lum was adopted by an elderly woman whom she called grandmother. She grew up amid poverty and blight in a former tin-mining town in the Malaysian state of Perak.

"Every morning when you woke up, you would hear people crying, quarreling, fighting because of poverty," she recalled in the interview.

"Sometimes in the morning when you open your door, you see bloodstains all over because there were gang fights.

"We were living in that area, and generation after generation they didn't seem to have any improvement in life."

It was that thought which propelled her to achieve higher things by getting an education.

She came to Singapore in 1978 to study, and working while studying, she finished a university degree and was employed at a multinational company as a chemist in charge of environmental treatment.

It was in this job that she thought of smaller firms which could not afford to treat and dispose of waste.

"I thought that in no time they're gonna dump all their waste into rivers without treatment. Over time, people will have no fresh water to drink," she said.

"I embarked on water treatment from then on. I dreamed about it and decided that I wanted to give it a try."

Resigning from her job despite objections from concerned friends, Lum sold her house and car and Hyflux was born.

Lum, who eventually became a Singapore citizen, has been held up by the government as an example to encourage would-be entrepreneurs.

But remaining humble despite her achievements, the still unmarried Lum said she does not relish being a poster girl for entrepreneurship.

"I don't think I'll qualify to be a poster girl. I suppose mine is only just a survival story," said Lum, whose net worth is estimated at 200 million dollars.

TERRA.WIRE