Sugar King Of Asia Case Study

The “Sugar King of Asia”, Mr Robert Kuok Hock Nien is a billionaire businessman who is origin from Malaysia. He is well-known not only in Malaysia, but throughout the global commerce industry. Since 2002, he has been the richest man in Southeast Asia upon his success in sugar business (Tan, 2014). He is a very humble man, and he prefers to live a simple life. He avoids media attention as he prefers a low-key life. In fact, he only had two interviews in the public throughout his entire career. As we know, Mr Kuok owns multiple companies in various fields and most of his businesses are managed by him or his family members. His business interests involve many aspects, which are sugarcane plantation, sugar refinery, oil and mining, flour milling,

Then, he continued to invest in the field of sugar refineries and found some partnerships in the sugar industry. In the mid-1960s, the sugar price was rose steadily, therefore the Kuok Brothers Sdn. Bhd. was able to grow rapidly. In 1968, 5,800 hectares of the land of FELDA was cleared for sugarcane by the establishment of Perlis Plantation, and in the early 1970s, ‘Kilang Gula Perlis’ which is the second sugar mill was founded in partnership with FELDA (Gambe, 1999). Mr Kuok formed Perlis Plantation is to expand the business interests of from trading sugar to produce sugar. This company had granted him with success. By producing 1.5 million tonnes of sugar, Mr Kuok controlled 80% of the sugar market in Malaysia, which is equals to 10% of the sugar production in the world (Shalini, 2015). Hence, Mr Kuok earned the name “Sugar King of

He bought back all the shares in both companies. In February 2014, PACC Offshore Services Holdings (POSH) which is the oil services company in Singapore, started pre-IPO (Initial Public Offering) talks with the investors. The main idea of the pre-IPO talks was listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange in order to raise $400 million (Cassin, 2014). According to Susanto and Susanto (20), “Robert Kuok has many investments in many countries throughout Asia, including Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Mainland China, and Indonesia, as well as in Australia and Fiji. He also has interests of freight in Malaysian Bulk Carriers Berhad and Transmile Group (Chua, 2014). Mr Kuok has many companies all around the world but the main holding companies in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Mr Kuok’s stake in Wilmar International Limited, which is the world’s largest palm oil company, is the main source of wealth for him (Wong,