CHATRI Sityodtong arrives about 20 minutes after the agreed time for our interview at the St Regis hotel's lobby lounge. The founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Singapore-based sports media property One Championship apologises profusely, as he's spent much of the morning hopping from one meeting to another, taking several phone calls in between.

To say that it's been a whirlwind start to the year for the 50-year-old Thai-Japanese entrepreneur and lifelong martial artist is putting it mildly.

During our chat over coffee, he discloses that, in January, the company closed the biggest revenue deal in its history - a multi-year agreement worth 8 figures per year, all of it in cash. Sityodtong couldn't go into more details nor reveal the identity of this client, except to say that an official announcement will be made soon.

Record number of bouts

On the entertainment front, The Apprentice: One Championship Edition - a reality TV series produced by One Studios with Sityodtong as its host - recently made its debut on Netflix and quickly soared to No 2 on its most-watched charts in Singapore. A second season is already in the works.

And come March 26, One Championship will stage a big show to mark its 10th anniversary, aptly titled One X, at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in Kallang.

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The current plan is to have the venue be at least 50 per cent full, but Sityodtong is hopeful that the government will give the green light to allow maximum capacity for what he promises will be a mind-blowing event with a record number of world championship bouts.

Even with seemingly so much going for it at the moment, One Championship continues to feel the heat from its detractors, many of whom question its financial health and the sustainability of its growth model.

But Sityodtong remains largely unperturbed, as he maintains that it is common to be "misunderstood" because of the scale and size of One Championship's ambitions to become not just an industry leader in Asia, but globally as well.

"Look at our investor base - there's Sequoia Capital, Guggenheim, Temasek, the Qatar Investment Authority, GIC - they are among the smartest investors in the world. They see our vision, and they understand it," he says.

External validation

Sityodtong also points to the "external validation" that's come from the likes of Nielsen and Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) in recent months.

Last June, Nielsen ranked One Championship among the top 10 sports properties in the world in terms of viewership and engagement. CrowdTangle, the Meta-owned data analytics platform, ranked One Championship top in the world out of over 5,000 sports media properties for organic online viewership in 2021.

Sityodtong tries his best to explain why there are so many naysayers out there who try to downplay anything that One Championship does.

"It's easy to take an existing business and try to make it better - say, there's a chicken rice stall out there and you want to open a better one. You don't invite a lot of controversy because it's not a crazy thing to do," he says.

"For the tech start-ups, there are a million comparisons. Grab has GoJek, Lyft has Uber - it's very easy to compare. Before us, Asia has never had a global sports media property, so it can be hard for people to understand what we do. There's no competitor to point to."

As far as live events are concerned, Sityodtong reveals that there will be as many as 36 shows in total this year, a number that puts it close to pre-Covid levels. There are also plans to resume live shows outside of Singapore, starting from June, as international borders reopen.

For now, much of Sityodtong's attention will be on ensuring that One X - the show that celebrates One Championship's first decade of operations - will be a success. There will be 24 fights in all, with the main event featuring Angela Lee's long-awaited return to the cage to defend her atomweight world championship against Thailand's Stamp Fairtex.

Whether the Indoor Stadium is filled to capacity or not, there will be at least several thousand spectators present, according to Sityodtong. This will be the highest attendance at that venue since the start of the pandemic.

"We've only been able to have 500 fans or even none at all, for some of our shows during this Covid period, so it will be great to get back to having a few thousand of them at this show," he says.

"A dream of mine is to stage a mega-event at the National Stadium at the Sports Hub in front of more than 50,000 people. I will try and make it happen one day. That will be truly amazing."