Chuang's big measure of success--a couple of world-class customers--has not yet happened, but it could.
Now they make up 21% of sales, and Chuang wants the split eventually to be closer to 50-50.
"It's a great business model, the two businesses are complementary, " with each contributing about half of profits, says Chuang.
The protectionism inspired the elder Chuang and his siblings to create Silver Queen, using local cocoa beans and cashews.
"We've achieved about 90% accuracy, " says Dr Chen-Long Chuang, one of the scientists who developed the sensing and forecast technologies.
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The upshot of all that is an overall trend of consolidation, Chuang figures, with or without an upturn in the economy.
Chuang thinks software acquisition and development costs are already out of control, and products like his will lead to more cost-cutting.
"If I can just convince you to eat chocolate every day, I'll triple my sales, " Chuang tells people in his realm.
Chuang therefore has a challenge on his hands as chief executive of Petra Foods, the number one chocolate company in Southeast Asia.
More than a half-century ago, John Chuang's father, Ming Chee Chuang, fled Burma and settled in Bandung, on the Indonesian island of Java.
If Lee winds up in Tokyo he would most likely be given a title more elaborate than that of the current director, Chuang Ming-yao.
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Although Chuang continues to promote Goya chocolate bars in the country, he vows not to fight head-on with me-too products but to concoct new treats.
John Chuang, who received engineering and business degrees in the U.K. before moving to the U.S. for six years, had his own ideas about selling chocolate.
Petra's stock has nearly doubled from its opening price two years ago when it was listed in Singapore, where the company is headquartered and Chuang lives.
And Mr. Chuang points out that the show is organized like a novel, in which each section is a chapter and each picture equivalent to a paragraph.
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Even as Chuang looks to boost Southeast Asian consumption, he has smartly found a way for his small company to play in the much bigger global world of chocolate.
By blanketing the lower end of the market with such variety, Chuang has fended off challenges from rivals, even as Indonesia opened its chocolate market, imposing a modest 5% tariff on imports.
Two weeks ago a team led by Isaac Chuang at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people) disclosed that it had built a 5-qubit quantum computer and used it to solve a relatively simple mathematical problem.
"One of the things I think he carried over to his art is what initially drew him to writers like Joyce and Shakespeare: a deep interest and concern for the human condition and of human nature, " Mr. Chuang says.
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Chuang won't know how he is doing with 8.1 until the end of the fiscal quarter--that's when most large deals close in software--but says "the buzz in the field (from sales reps) is extremely high...so is the number of beta customers we're crossing" into actually purchasing the product.
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