But mangosteen trees raised from seed take a decade or longer to bear fruit, so he did not send his first, tiny shipments to the mainland until 2006, and they all went to the Northeast, where Crown and his wife live.
In the company's cramped headquarters, only a handful of the noses -- small metal arms with clusters of sensors at the end -- line shelves in a tiny warehouse, awaiting shipment.
This represents a tiny number of shipments compared to the LCD TV panel market, which is set to reach 232.6 million units in 2013.
They crack open a tiny fraction of all shipments and send to the agency's laboratories an even tinier fraction.
So far, American trade restrictions have covered a tiny percentage of Chinese shipments to the United States.
In its forecast, "others" apart from iOS and Android account for only a tiny sliver of overall shipments — and, by default, sales.
Robert Schubert, director of research at Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit group, says the F.D.A. is sampling only a tiny fraction of the food shipments entering American ports, which means much of the tainted seafood may be making it to stores.
By contrast, its railroads carry only a tiny fraction of the province's freight shipments.
Sales of Nokia's phones were picking up in some parts of their world, but they were still a tiny, single-digit fraction of smartphone shipments.
In emergency aid, the United States is the big holdout; grain shipments make up all but a tiny percentage of American emergency food aid.
