Antonio L. Ong: The Tropical Fish Breeder

Antonio L. Ong: The Tropical Fish Breeder
By
Melchor F. Cichon
December 31, 2005

The first time I met him, he was riding on a carabao.

The last time I met him he was riding in an air-conditioned D Max pick-up car together with his beautiful wife, Cristina, and their three children, Anne Kristin, Bryan Lester, and Anthony III.

Not only that, he has a five-story apartment and a house of his own in Makati City.

What made him a successful entrepreneur? Read on.

It all started as a hobby.

Antonio L. Ong, a native of San Remigio, Antique was amazed on the various species of tropical freshwater aquarium fishes of their neighbor at Ponti, Makati City.

That was in the 1980s.

Because he had no money to buy some pieces of those fishes, Tony, as his friends call him, befriended the owner, Mr. Toti Javier.


Mr. Javier noticed that Tony was really interested in culturing tropical fishes, so he gave him some pairs as a gift.

Tony was so happy of his gift.

But he was not just satisfied with that gift.

He wanted to know more, especially on how to breed them. The wage was not that important. What was important to him was on how to culture them and later on how to economically profit from them.

Tony volunteered to be an assistant. Luckily, Mr. Javier accepted him.

So he worked at Mr. Javier freshwater fishes for nine continuous years, long enough to know the whole trade.

Part of his job was to deliver live aquarium fishes to different pet shops in Metro Manila. Mr. Javier would give him twenty pesos for his travel allowance.

But the money given to him was more than enough. The minimum jeepney fare then was less then one peso.

He kept the rest of his allowance for his studies.

In one occasion, he discovered that the people whom he delivered aquarium fishes was a middle man and this middle man would sell his fishes in much higher prices to Chinese aquarium fish dealers.

With this information, he decided to deal directly with the Chinese fish dealers. With that he got higher commission.

If he was not delivering fishes, he would clean the aquaria, feed the fishes and treat them when they contacted diseases,

He would also observe how to breed fishes.

Then one time, he was asked by a certain fish dealer, Mr. Leoncio Chua, to breed a certain angel fish. At that time, angel fishes were exported to the United States of America.

Mr. Chua assured him that if he could make it spawn, he would get a five percent commission of the net sale.

Aside from his monthly salary of Ph P3,000.

For Tony, that offer was the opportunity he had been dreaming of. So he accepted the challenge.

Since he had no educational background on fish breeding, he asked helps from his friends and from the technicians at the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.

After several attempts, he was able to breed it. He duplicated his experiment. Again, he was successful.

With that, he was given twenty-five thousand pesos as a commission. In the 1980s that amount was already something.

That event encouraged him to learn more about the aquarium fish industry, including its business aspect.

Meanwhile, he invested his earned money on taxis. He was able to buy one taxi unit, which he himself drove it. Later, he was able to buy three more taxi units.

But he was not meant to be a taxi driver.

So he sold his taxis and invested on ihaw-ihaw restaurant together with his half brother, Sonny Cabrera.

Their restaurant business was earning enough, but later he noticed that there was something wrong with the way the business was being managed. So he decided to quite from the partnership and decided to establish alone a tropical fish breeding industry. This time, it would be located at the yard of the ancestral house of his wife.

He bought large aquaria with all the necessary accessories like aerators and power filter. He put up grow-up cement tanks. He purchased high quality fish breeders and begun his culture on tropical aquarium fishes. He hired a male relative as a helper.

As time went by, his business progressed.

And the demand for more tropical fishes grew.

But then other countries like China begun to penetrate the local aquarium fish industry by bringing in more attractive and high quality fishes, and at lower prices.

But as they say, the more the merrier.

The other problem cited by Tony is the lack of technical assistance from the government on how to improve the quality of tropical fish breeders so that they can compete with the imported tropical fishes from China and Taiwan.

“Kaya, kanya-kanya na lang na diskarte,” he said.

So he planned proper strategies to stay put in the business. Otherwise, he would be gone.

One of these strategies employed by Tony is to keep himself abreast with the market situations by reading the newspapers and listening to radios and television broadcasts. He listened to the suggestions of his customers.

“If it is necessary to lower the prices, then so be it,” he said.

The other strategy he thought of was to culture as many varieties of tropical fishes as possible. This way, the buyers will have more choices.

“And I make sure,” he said, “that the fishes I produce are healthy so as not to lose my suki.”

“But if my delivered fishes die within a certain period of time, I will immediately replace them,” he assures this writer..

He told this writer that he keeps his helpers by giving their wages on time and he regularly supplies them with free rice.

“If they are hungry, they cannot work well,” he told this writer. “And they will leave you,” he continued.

So until now, Tony is still culturing and selling tropical aquarium fishes.

Some of the species he is culturing are black moley, short tail, carp, oratus, janitors, black moor goldfish, blue flatty, bleeding heart, angel fish, and hammerhead shark.

“Why no flower horn (Genus Cichlasoma) and arowana (Osteoglossum sp.)?”, I asked him.

“Aside from being difficult to culture them,” he said, “we cannot compete with the species being shipped in by the Chinese and the Taiwanese.”

"Why not do some experiments to improve what we have?, " I asked him.

"We have no more time for that, " he said.

Looking back, Tony remembered his childhood days.

Immediately after he was born on November 22, 1963 in Makati, he was deposited by his mother to his uncle, in San Remigio, Antique. There he was raised in the farm. When he was bigger enough to plow the field, he would get up at five in the morning and bring their carabao to his uncle’s rice field and plow.

At nine in the morning, he would gather grasses for their carabao or just let it feed itself in their backyard.

But he never ignored his studies.

He finished his high school at St. Vincent School in San Remigio, Antique, a private high school.

During summer vacation, her Ninang Rita Dollolasa, would bring him to Manila to meet his mother, Mrs. Perla Llera, and his two half brothers, and returned to Antique when the vacation was over.

After finishing his high school education, he decided to stay with his mother, along with his half-brothers and his step-father in Makati, Metro Manila. After several years, his half-sister was born.

There he continued his studies at Makati Polytechnic College.

Because of poverty, he was not able to finish a college degree.

But it was there where he met his beautiful wife, the former Cristina Morales of Bangkal, Makati.

After their marriage, Tony transferred to Bangkal and put up his tropical freshwater fish aquarium business. It is in Bangkal where he breeds his fishes and transport the fries to Laguna to grow in his freshwater earthen ponds.

With this, he harvests twice a week and sell his product in whole sale to the different pet shops in Metro Manila.