Steven Leung, founder of Nezha.com and Hong Kong Heritage Development Ltd., was born in HK. He went to US to attend university in 1980. After receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1989, he worked in the IC design R&D area in Silicon Valley. In Septempber 2002, Dr. Leung moved to Shanghai to work as Sr. Director of the engineering organization in a Taiwanese IC design house. On a fateful night at the end of 2004, he incidentally caught sight of the cartoon movie <<Nezha Conquer the Dragon King>> being shown on the TV's children channel, and was attracted to sit thru the movie to the very end. As deeply moved by the movie and yet missing the first part, he bought the DVD home and watched it over again. He was surprised by the fact that the movie was made in as early as 1978. Having worked in the IC area for the past 20 years and never seen one single IC with some impacts can last for more than a few years without becoming obsolete, he realized how extraordinarily outstanding the movie is: With such artistic force, it is bound to transcend time and space and be passed to future generations. Later, he noticed that in the doll market, there are all sorts of models, from Santa, Barbie to Superman, Cutie-gals, yet no Nezha model is available. He then started thinking of making the Nezha dolls.
After defeating the SARS in 2003, China rise has practically been accepted as a fact, and the interests on China have grown into setting roots in the cultural areas. Riding along the wave, the Chinese Ministry of Education has expanded the program of establishing Confucius Institutes, in cooperation with universities overseas, to teach foreigners HanYu (Chinese language). The Ministry of Culture has also opened up new Chinese cultural centers overseas. When the International Conference on HanYu Education was convened in Beijing in mid-2005, it was reported that the number of people learning HanYu overseas had reached 30 millions, and had been increasing at a rate of over 40%. As such, it becomes apparant that the continued growth of the Chinese economy will create demands on products with Chinese cultural contents. Rooted in the Chinese mythical story, the Nezha character created by Shanghai Art Cinema (SAC) has a healthy and lovely image, and with its extremely intense artistic force to raise people's emotion and empathy, it is best poised to take the advantage of the demands on products with Chinese cultural contents.
During the stage of market survey and planning, in view of the irreplacable values of the Nezha domain name as a brand name as well as a platform for future developments, both Nezha's international (nezha.com) and China domain (nezha.com.cn) names were acquired. Later, SAC was convinced to grant Steven's company the license to exclusively produce toys, gifts and premiums using SAC's Nezha image. Sensing that the conditions for starting-up a venture on Nezha has become ripe, Dr. Leung has delightfully parted with his 20-year long IC engineering career to become a dedicated super-fan of Nezha. The ultimate dream is to make Nezha one of the top three in the world doll market.