From fish nets to a global empire: Goh Cheng Liang in his own words
Goh Cheng Liang, founder of the Wuthelam group, attributes much of his success to luck and his capable staff, says CATHERINE ONG
This article was first published in The Business Times on Sept 26, 1997.
HE made Nippon Paint a household name in Asia and built a multi billion-dollar business empire across the region. But modest to a fault, Goh Cheng Liang, founder of the Wuthelam group, attributes much of his success to “luck” and the capable people who worked for him.
He rarely gives media interviews but when he did last week to BT, he was chatty, humorous and disarmingly candid. He talks in an animated fashion, in a mixture of English and Teochew, his hands sweeping the air, his tanned and rugged face frequently breaking into laughter or a smile.
At 69, Goh claims he is “75 per cent retired” and leaves much of the running of Nipsea Holdings, the unlisted paint group, to his elder son, Hup Jin. His two Singapore-listed companies, Liang Court Holdings and Omni Industries Ltd, are run by Koh Boon Hwee, the former head of Hewlett-Packard Singapore whom Mr Goh hired in 1990.
Goh’s attention is now largely confined to Yenom Holdings, a private company he set up in 1991 to “house” the 30-plus old staffers who were displaced by an organisational revamp carried out by Mr Koh when he first came on board. Yenom absorbed what didn’t fit in the new Wuthelam order. But within six years, it expanded into an array of interests, including the Gulf Harbour project in New Zealand, Tung Lok Shark’s Fin restaurants, Risis Orchid, and the Sala Levu resort in Fiji.
Yenom, he admits, amounted to a breach of his earlier promise to let Koh run the entire Wuthelam group. It is the largest private part of Mr Goh’s tangled mass of corporate ownerships, which, at last count, totalled 363 companies with more than $2 billion in turnover, three of which are listed in Singapore - Liang Court Holdings, Omni Industries and Superior Metal Printing - and one in Malaysia.
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Ever mindful of his humble beginnings and his lack of a formal education, Goh reckons he is better suited to running a private company than a public one with its demands for rigorous compliance with modern management disciplines and regulatory requirements. “My personal philosophy is I never want to go public,” he says. “First, I’m not a professional manager. Second, these professional managers who come and join me, I don’t know how to handle them, I don’t know how to drive them.”
Goh does not surround himself with the aura and accoutrements of wealth. His office in an industrial building at Genting Lane, off MacPherson Road, is spartanly-furnished with lacquered furniture, plastic flowers and a map of the world. The only luxury he seems to allow himself after half a century of toil is his collection of super-yachts and catamarans. He says he spends half the month on board White Rabbit II, his US$30 million (S$45.3 million) Feadship yacht with its three-deck atrium, solid mahogany and marbled interior. It may take him deep-sea fishing off Lizard Island one day and scuba diving in Bali the next.
He claims to have few other indulgences. “I gave up golf 15 years ago because of my kneecap,” he says. “I don’t like cinemas, I don’t like movies, I don’t like songs, I don’t like karaoke, I don’t like bars. When I was young, I was quite naughty about girls but not so in the last 20 years.”
Goh’s rags-to-riches story started on the very site where Liang Court shopping centre at River Valley Road now stands. He spent the first 12 years of his life in a three-storey shophouse there, squeezed into a $3-a-month rented room with six others - his parents, three sisters and a brother. “My parents were very poor,” he recalls. “During the Japanese Occupation, my father was jobless, my mother was washing laundry, my sister was selling soon kway (a Chinese rice noodle cake).”
When World War II broke out, his parents sent him to Muar in Malaya to keep him out of harm’s way. There he helped his brother-in-law sell fishing nets before returning to Singapore in 1943. After the Japanese surrendered, he decided to go into a joint venture to produce aerated water, but the business quickly floundered. “No experience, went bust, everything finished, all my Tiger notes (Straits Settlement currency) disappeared,” he quips.
An apprenticeship at Tan Chong Huat Hardware at South Bridge Road followed. Among his gruelling tasks was riding a three-wheeled cart carrying four barrels of iron nails up Read Bridge, near Boat Quay, he recalls. In 1949, after four-and-a-half years with Tan Chong Huat, the itch to be his own boss got him again. The British army was auctioning off surplus stocks of everything from the war. He went and tried his luck and returned with barrels of “rotten paint”. He had acquired a little knowledge about paints from a short training course in Denmark while he was at the hardware store. Armed with a Chinese dictionary on chemicals, he got down to mixing colours and adding solvents and before long, created his own Pigeon Brand paints.
The following year, 1950, was to mark the first major turning point in his business. The Korean War started and, with imports severely restricted, Goh’s paint business boomed.
His reputation grew and in 1959, Sim Lim Investments - then agent for Nippon Paints - approached him to become a distributor. A joint venture called Pan-Malayan Paint Industry was formed in 1961 with Nippon of Osaka, Sim Lim and the Charoen Pokhphand (CP) group of Thailand. But the partnership didn’t last long. Sim Lim lost interest in the paint business while the CP group wanted to concentrate on animal feeds.
Much of the expansion in the region in the 1960s and 1970s was funded by Goh. “We went through hard times until 1973,” he says. The oil crisis in 1973 marked the second turning point in his business life. It forced prices of paints up since they contained solvents made from crude oil. Goh managed to clear surplus stocks in his Indonesian factory at fat margins. “Thus, my fortune was built from these two events - the Korean War and the oil embargo,” he says.
Profits from the paint business were reinvested in real estate, which over the years became the biggest source of his wealth. He developed Mount Elizabeth Hospital and residential and commercial projects in Singapore, Hongkong, China and the US. Today, Goh’s sprawling business empire has come a long way from the fishing net enterprise he started out with in Muar.
Biography
Goh Cheng Liang Age: 69 Education: No formal education
Work experience: 1949: Apprentice at Tan Choon Huat Hardware at South Bridge Road. Buys first batch of cheap paints at British army auction 1959: Starts Chinam and Hup Trading to mix and sell cheap paints 1960s: Goes into joint venture with Nippon Paint, Sim Lim Investments and CP Pokphand of Thailand. Last two partners pull out, leaving Mr Goh as 60:40 partner with Nippon Paint 1970s to 1990s: Builds up Wuthelam group as conglomerate investing in real estate, hotels, electronics and trading
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