It’s the Aussie electronics giant that started out as a small store in the western Sydney suburb of Fairfield in 1957.
Today Bing Lee is a household name with 41 stores across Australia that turns over $490million a year.
But the family’s backstory could be a movie epic, with elements of rare sacrifice, a heart-breaking ten year family separation, war, famine, poverty and a reunion that underpinned the family’s extraordinary success.
There’s a dash of Aussie comedy in there, too, with its lead adventurer, the eponymous founder Bing Lee, taking a liking to calling everyone ‘cuz’ in his adopted homeland because he wasn’t great at remembering names.
Born in the port of Yantai in Shandong province, the smart young Bing Guin Lee studied commerce and worked as a wireless operator in China’s merchant navy.
He traded Chinese linen in his 20s, but in 1937, after the Japanese invaded mainland China, Bing decided he didn’t want to work for the occupiers.
The Bing Lee story began with the refusal by its studious founder, Bing Guin Lee, to work for Japanese invaders when they occupied China in 1937. He took what was then a radical decision to look for work in Australia
After Bing Lee was reunited with his family after 10 years, in 1957 in Sydney, he and son Ken started an electronics repair business in Fairfield. Pictured, one of the family’s first stores
He took the radical decision to move to Australia, working with friends who were exporting local handicrafts down under.
He landed in Sydney with a plan to do what south-east Asian workers have done for generations, work overseas and send money home to his family: his wife, Show Fen Shou, and his son and daughter.
He intended to be in Australia for three years, but the outbreak of World War Two changed everything.
That began a painful separation between Bing, his young wife and children.
He would not have any contact with them until the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The Japanese occupation made it impossible for Bing to return home or to contact anyone back home.
Australian laws also forbade money from being sent to occupied mainland China.
Back in China, his family were battling to survive.
The family faced famine in the area where they lived and had to survive by trading their possessions and living on rations.
After the war ended, Bing’s family joined a flood of refugees fleeing the devastation of their home caused by the Japanese occupation.
But the journey was long and arduous. It took three years for them to make it across China and to reach Hong Kong, where they finally boarded a ship headed for Sydney.
When Bing finally reunited with his family at Sydney wharf, it was 1948, and his son Ken was 17. He barely remembered his dad.
Bing made it his life’s goal to keep his family together and build a better life for all of them.
The success of the Bing Lee business hinged on the father-son partnership of Ken (left) and Bing (right) Lee, pictured together in the 1980s
When co-founder Ken Lee died from cancer in 2007, the company marked his passing with a memorial at Sydney Town Hall and a motorcade of delivery trucks (pictured)
Current Bing Lee boss Lionel Lee and his wife Lisa. At the company’s annual conference in 2022, he noted how proud he was that his four children are all ‘involved’ in the business
He put the last of his savings from working for the previous ten years into purchasing a local fruit and vegetable market.
They bought land at Fairfield, where the family business’s headquarters remains more than 70 years after they started trading.
Ken Lee, determined not to leave his father to support the family alone, put his study ambitions on hold. He was driven to help the family business succeed.
In the mid-1950s, the father and son team spotted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the brand-new field of consumer electronics.
The star item in any suburban home was the television, which began broadcasting in Australia in 1956.
TCN-9 first broadcast in Sydney on October 27 1956, while HSV7 started in Melbourne a week later, kicking off with an interview with Mrs Edna Everage, Barry Humphries’ iconic comic creation.
The 1950s was also the ‘whitegoods’ revolution, and housewives lapped up the dream of the ‘automatic household’.
The most practical was the refrigerator, but the time saved to spend on leisure was a huge part of the appeal of washing machines, dishwashers and even smaller appliances like blenders and toasters.
Bing traded his fruit shop for an electrical repair shop in 1957, which he and Ken developed into an electrical retail store that also offered installation and repairs.
His second masterstroke was in providing credit and low prices to fellow migrants – and the ability to know who might honour a loan and who to refuse.
His good faith shown to the new working-class migrants of Fairfield meant the Bing Lee brand quickly formed a bond of trust with locals.
The decision also helped bring appliances, especially televisions, to western Sydney that people in the city and the eastern suburbs could afford more easily.
Ken fell in love with a young Chinese woman named Yenda as the business grew. Her family was from the same part of China as the Lees, so the families gave their blessings, and the couple married.
Yenda, the daughter of a hard-working Chinese merchant, was familiar with the passion and dedication it takes to make a business work.
She would go on to become the Bing Lee matriarch, worth $482 million in 2017, according to the BRW rich list.
Ken Lee’s wife Yenda would go on to become the Bing Lee matriarch, worth $482million in 2017, according the BRW rich list
Lee family members gather inside the foyer before the memorial service for Ken Lee at the Sydney Town Hall on February 5, 2008
Singer Lorina Gore performs a tribute song during the memorial service for Ken Lee at the Sydney Town Hall in 2008
Bing Lee’s story from the 1960s was one of steady expansion, with Ken increasingly in charge with Yenda at his side. A second store opened at Cabramatta in 1963, and then a move into the ACT came.
Meanwhile, its founder, Bing, took a back seat as he immersed himself in life as a naturalised Aussie.
He was a Rotarian, a staunch Christian, and a keen lawn bowls player who served as the Fairfield bowling club president.
‘He was renowned for calling everyone ‘Cuz’, an expression that disguised his failure to remember names,’ according to the Australian dictionary of biography.
In 1987, 50 years after he arrived for a three-year stay, Bing passed away at age 81.
Over 66 years, the Lee family has built a booming retail empire of 44 stores, mostly in New South Wales but also in Victoria, Queensland and the ACT. It is the largest privately held electrical retail business in NSW.
Bing Lee’s continued success was all built on the same foundations of keeping the family together and, where it made sense to, making suppliers and customers feel like part of that family too.
Part of the company’s appeal was their sense of humour and willingness to fit into Australian culture rather than resist it.
The company’s snappy signature jingle, ‘I like Bing Lee’, which debuted in 1986, was a play on Monty Python’s 1980 song ‘I like Chinese’, whose lyrics would viewed today as deeply racist.
‘I like Chinese. They only come up to your knees. They’re always friendly and they’re ready to please,’ Monty Python’s lyrics went.
Over 66 years the Lee family has built a booming retail empire of 44 stores mostly in New South Wales but also in Victoria, Queensland and the ACT. It is the largest privately held electrical retail business in NSW
Bing Lee’s version ignores all of that, but the family obviously looked past the dodgy lyrics to spot a winning melody.
While nobody remembers the Python song, Bing Lee’s jingle has been etched in the memories of millions of Aussies for over 30 years.
The business notes its guiding principles remain unchanged: ‘Our people are our family, our suppliers are our family, and we like to think our customers are part of the family as well.’
It may have been the magic ingredient that helped Bing Lee survive when wave after wave of Aussie retailers went under in the past decade.
Hundreds of Australian chains to shut up shop permanently include electronics retailers Dick Smith in 2016, EB Games in 2013, Queensland-based Wow Sight and Sound in 2012 and Brashs in 1998.
Sanity Music announced closing its last 50 Australian stores on March 27, 2023.
There’s little doubt hard work and determination to succeed as a family unit is part of the reason it’s still going too.
Two days before his death from liver cancer in 2007, aged 75, Ken Lee told a close friend, ‘I have so many things to do at work’.
He also said he would never retire.
After Ken passed on December 21, 2007, the family paid tribute with a public memorial at Sydney Town Hall, attended by a motorcade of Bing Lee delivery trucks.
His eldest son Lionel Lee immediately took over as chief executive.
Lionel’s speech at the company’s annual conference in 2022, also its 65th anniversary, made it clear where he thinks the company’s future lies.
‘My four children, Jasmine, Jordan, Joshua and Jesse, are all involved in the business today and participating in the conference as Bing Lee employees. I am so incredibly proud to have them in the business.’
In March this year Lionel Lee told The Australian: ‘You’re nothing without family.’
‘You can be the wealthiest man in the world or the strongest man in the world, but if you’ve got no one to share it with, who are you doing it for?’
Daily Mail Australia approached Bing Lee for comment.
