What happens if you identify an operating issue that has cut deeply into your company’s profit? The best staff, of course, try to help their companies solve the problem. The most entrepreneurial ones, however, will turn it into an opportunity for their own business venture. This is what has happened in the case of Huang Zhen, a former executive of Alibaba.

Zhen got her start at the telecoms equipment giant Huawei, having been put in charge of its overseas sales in Africa in 2008. Before long, she was dispatched to the Middle East. In 2015, she changed direction, signing up as the chief technology officer of a joint venture between Alibaba Cloud and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) company Meraas.

Two years later, having come to know first hand how last-mile deliveries had become the bottleneck in Alibaba’s expansion in the Middle East, she resigned. Huang founded a courier company called iMile that focused on the Middle East, where e-commerce sales were starting to flourish. The goal, she declared, was to be the SF Express of the region. While that might have sounded ambitious, the start-up was already reporting revenues of Rmb1 billion ($157.3 million) by 2021 and it expects to rake in five times that amount this year.

iMile’s sales area already encompasses 60% of the Middle East countries, with a  list of cross-border clients including Amazon, SheIn and Zain, to name but a few. Its business model is based around sellers from China that deliver their packages into a consolidation warehouse. Once the packages are received, they are forwarded to Dubai, where iMile is based. After customs clearance, the merchandise heads for one of iMile’s warehouses and a fulfilment team, which take care of last-mile delivery.

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