In “Starting from Scrap,” American Stephen Greer takes a look back at the years 1993 to 2005, when he founded Hartwell Pacific as a start-up scrap company in Hong Kong that he eventually sold to Australia’s Smorgon Steel (now OneSteel).
Greer started the company in 1993 as a 24-year-old who identified the scrap markets as a way to tap into the energy and entrepreneurialism that he could sense in Hong Kong.
His 240-page book portrays the ups and downs that came with building the business—many of them tied to the scrap market where commodities markets always provide their own ups and downs and rejected loads can cause deals to go sour.
By the time he sold first a percentage of the company in 2003 and the remainder of it in 2005, Hartwell Pacific was earning more than $150 million by selling scrap metal to the growing metals production industries of East Asia.
Throughout “Starting from Scrap,” Greer uses pseudonyms for people and companies with whom he traded with and collaborated with during his career. Industry insiders, in many cases, may well be able to identify many of the people and the companies portrayed.
The book will be published by Burford Books, Short Hills, N.J., in March 2010. At that time, it will be available to be ordered through Burford’s Web site at www.burfordbooks.com.
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