“WHEN I work, I work with passion,” says Antonio N. Chiu, president of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI). And work with passion, he does.
Chiu was born in Cebu City and studied in Sacred Heart School for Boys for high school, in the University of the Philippines (UP) for his chemical engineering degree, in UP Cebu for his master’s degree in business administration and in the University of Asia and the Pacific for a program on strategic business economics.
He is president of Anilson Packaging Solutions Inc., Coastal Highpoint Ventures Inc. (a real estate company), Anilson Ventures Inc., which is into trading and also real estate, and Nutrivalue Technologies Inc., which produces a soy-based product sold to food processors. He is happily married to Janette Nellie Chiu with whom he has three children.
Chiu started his career with the family business which was lumber and wood processing, and he was directly involved with Grand Cement, set up by his uncle Enrique Benedicto. For four years, from 1990 to 1994, he was busy setting up the plant and then he managed it until it was sold to Taiheiyo Cement Phil. Inc. in 2000. He also managed the plant for Taiheiyo for two years, after which he quit as he wanted to concentrate on his own companies. Today, he’s still with Taiheiyo as senior consultant.
He speaks of Anilson Packaging Solutions with pride, as this is the company which has enticed all his three children—Janet Abigail, Jillian Alison and Jason Anthony—to work for him. The company “revolutionizes the way cement bags are made,” he said. “Today, the new cement bags are welded together. We supply the bags to all cement plants in the Visayas-Mindanao area. The children enjoy working there because everything is mechanized. It is a state-of-the-art, high-tech plant. At the end of the day, buying efficient and reliable equipment is well worth the price.”
His involvement with the Cebu Chamber of Commerce, he explains, is a way “of giving back.” Being with the manufacturing sector of the chamber, he advocates “lessening the cost of doing business, (and cutting red tape to ensure the) ease of doing business,” which he adds, “is necessary especially for the small and medium scale industries which would die out if it would be too costly and too hard to do business.”
“If a country is to be progressive, government must make sure the manufacturing sector is competitive,” Chiu said. He mentioned the high cost of power and traffic congestion as among the contributors to the high cost of doing business in Cebu. He added that to help solve the traffic problem, the CCCI has made a stand to back the Bus Rapid Transit project, provided road widening is part of it.
Like many other members of the Benedicto side of his family, he is also an honorary consul (Slovakia). There are very few Slovaks who find their way to Cebu but when they do, they can count on Chiu for help if they need help. He has already assisted four Slovaks who came to Cebu to marry their girlfriends. In this instance, he makes sure the girls know what they’re getting into.
Asked how he copes with stress, Chiu replied: “When I work, I work with passion. In everything you do, work with passion. If you work with passion, it is not stressful. You don’t feel tired. If you work with passion, you’re doing the best in everything you do. The most stressful work is work you don’t like.”
And doing his best, chemical engineer Antonio Ng Chiu has earned the respect and admiration of his peers, receiving the 2013 Professional Degree Award for Chemical Engineering awarded by the UP Alumni Engineers and College of Engineering, UP Diliman, and the 2014 Outstanding Chemical Engineer Award from the Professional Regulation Commission.