In 2024, Forbes declared Robert Kuok the richest man in Malaysia. It also declared him the richest man in Malaysia the prior year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and so on — Kuok has managed to maintain this position for over 20 years. His net worth of 11.8 billion (as of 2025) comes from the Kuok Group conglomerate and its diverse array of businesses in foodstuffs, agriculture, hospitality, and real estate. While he was born to a wealthy father, by the time he got his start in business, Kuok was of modest means. He laid the foundation for his empire over the next 30 years.
Kuok Hock Nien, or Robert Kuok, was born the youngest of three brothers in 1923, when Malaya was still under British rule. When he was a child, he lived in relative wealth and privilege. His dad had already established a company, Tong Seng and Co., and had more than $500k in Malayan dollars by 1921, becoming one of the richest Chinese families in Malaya and Singapore at the time.
Kuok’s father was an immigrant from Fuzhou, China, and felt handicapped in business because of his lack of English. He foresaw that Malaya would remain strongly British for the foreseeable future. As a result, Kuok and his brothers had excellent English educations up till their O’levels, going to Bukit Zaharah English school and then English College in Johor Bahru.
However, by the start of the Great Depression in 1928, Kuok’s dad had fallen on hard times. Kuok was five years old. This fall from grace was painful for the family — Kuok’s dad resorted to borrowing money from Indian moneylenders, and his mother had to scrimp and save to take care of Kuok and his brothers. They fought constantly. Kuok distinctively remembers walking to school — his father owned a motorcar, but there was a 20-30% chance that it would break down on any given day. “We were only acting like the sons of a rich towkay”, he wrote, decades later. Even so, Kuok was able to enroll in a Chinese language school for a year and a half before he went on to attend the prestigious Raffles College in Singapore. Kuok recalled, “I think two-thirds or three-quarters of the top civil servants in Malaysia had been at Raffles College when I was there; many of the others were in school with me in Johor.”
But Kuok had barely made it six months in Raffles College before the Japanese invaded Malaya.
In December 1941, Kuok’s family evacuated to a pineapple plantation belonging to the richest Chinese businessman at the time, Lee Kong Chian. Their stay was not without event. They were visited two or three times by squads of Japanese soldiers on bicycles. Kuok’s mother would sit on the ground whenever they approached, and write Chinese characters in the sand. The Japanese would write back. Once, the soldiers said they were going to come back at night. Everyone agreed this was bad news. Some family friends had brought three guns with them to the plantation, which they had buried on Mother’s orders. They held a meeting that afternoon, and agreed to dig the guns up and load them, posting the men as sentries throughout the night.
Luck was with them. The Japanese never visited; later, Kuok learnt that the troops had been called away for the invasion of Singapore.
Years later, Kuok would realise just how shrewd his mother was. The family was told — like all town residents in the area — to return to Johor Bahru to register with the Japanese authorities. On the journey back, the party stopped at a small village named Ulu Tiram. They saw ‘some crazed people sitting on the pavement’, who ‘had gone out of their minds’ after witnessing a terrible massacre by the Japanese.
Kuok heard the story second- or third-hand. He writes, in his biography:
… what had happened was that, as the British forces were pushed down the Malay Peninsula towards Singapore, the Eurasians of southern Malaya decided to group together. They chose as their refuge a little Catholic church in Ulu Tiram. They came from many towns in the state of Johor. In total, they numbered about 80 souls: men, women, and children. They took with them all the things from their daily lives. The battles were raging a day’s walk away, and of course there was nothing to do. They seemed to be unaware of the enormity of the tragedy and barbarity that was gripping Malaya.
To pass the time, these Eurasian families had evening gatherings, playing gramophone records, a little dancing, maybe a little alcohol — in normal times all very innocent behaviour. A small detachment of Japanese soldiers came by, attracted by the noise. The Japanese asked for drinks. Maybe one of the soldiers groped or tried to grope a girl. There were screams and a scuffle and a sudden stand-off when weapons were drawn on both sides. The Japanese were outnumbered. Then, the tension broke. The Japanese smiled apologetically and withdrew; pistols were holstered. The Eurasians breathed a sigh of relief.
One or two nights later, a truckload of Japanese soldiers came back, cordoned off the area, and an orgy of killing took place.
Kuok then realised that his mother had made a number of small but good decisions:
Lee Kong Chian was a rubber baron, but we didn’t seek refuge in his rubber plantations; we went to his pineapple plantation. Rubber plantations are like deep forests while pineapple fields are only waist high, so one can see clear across them. To Japanese soldiers, we would just look like peasant workers, not fugitives in hiding. We were told to bury all our weapons. Mother ordered us to throw away all alcohol. Yet, she knew that when the soldiers came, we had to offer them something, so we offered them tea and cheap cigarettes. The girls were ordered to hide upriver, but always to be washing clothes so that they didn’t like they were hiding. Each of these decisions tilted the balance towards survival.
Kuok’s mother also left an indelible mark on him through her teachings on virtue. As a devoted Buddhist, she often counselled Kuok and his brothers on the importance of acting fairly and justly. Throughout his long business career, Kuok would always return to consult her on any major business decisions he made.
After returning to Johor Bahru in 1942, a passing Japanese soldier (who was of Taiwanese origin) saw that Kuok and his brothers were young, capable men, and cautioned that they would need to volunteer for work, or risk being questioned. He offered them a job as an assistant for Mitsubishi Trading, who wanted to open a new office in Johor Bahru. When none of his brothers spoke up, Kuok volunteered.
Mitsubishi was the biggest Japanese corporation in Singapore, and had a monopoly on importing and supplying rice and cigarettes in Malaya, granted by the Japanese Military Administration. Kuok was put in charge of checking orders and inspecting supplies, working there all the way until the Japanese surrendered in 1945. During this period, he saw what made them tick: discipline. Their unerring perseverance and obedience, even on orders which were wrong, was something that Kuok noticed, internalised and later used in his business dealings with the Japanese.
Mitsubishi’s offices shuttered when the Japanese surrendered in 1945, and Kuok returned to help out at his father’s company. The transition was not without event, though. Kuok insisted that he wound up his work at Mitsubishi, for free, in the final months after the surrender. One day, Kuok’s boss, a man named Uemura, asked him: “How much money do you and your father have?” Kuok asked why. Uemura explained:
“We have stocks of 200 or 300 bales of cigarette paper from Japan. I’ll sell it to you for all this useless banana currency [the Japanese currency that was no longer legal tender]. You make an invoice; I’ll sign it. You keep the receipt. Your property.”
So I bought the very big reams of cigarette paper and gave them to Father. He eventually sold that cigarette paper for up to $400,000, legal tender, at a time when nobody had capital.
Then Cousin Number Twelve, Hock Seng, received a similar gift. He had been working in a Japanese cooperative society, a kumiai, which was the sole distributor of textiles. This kumiai ended the war with a big stock of cheap, Japanese floral cloth. The manager had taken a liking to my cousin and did the same thing for him. He said, “Give me some money and I’ll sell all the remaining bales of textiles to you.” So Hock Seng bought huge lorry loads of textiles with a valueless currency. He handed the goods to my father too. So Father, who continued with his rice trade, suddenly had capital in cash of some $700,000.
At the end of the war, Tong Seng and Co. had become more of a family business, where Kuok’s eldest brother and several cousins worked.
Initially, Kuok was in charge of the fresh-produce contract with the British Military Administration (BMA), where they collected fresh vegetables and fruit every day from the countryside for Japanese prisoners of war. Then in 1946, Tong Seng became in charge of the governmental distribution of essential food-stuffs, and Kuok took over BMA’s rice distribution and government supply depot.
In those few years, Kuok realised his father’s incompetence at business — he was lacking in leadership skills and prone to favouring certain relatives over others. Although Kuok was grateful to his father for his skills in public relations and English, their relationship was often strained. To Kuok, they were nothing more than employee and boss. In his autobiography, he reflected:
I realized that if I ever started a company, there would be no nepotism, no weakness. We are relatives — fine. But in the company, discipline matters. Whoever can produce the profit gets the reward. Simple. And I later cracked the whip over all my cousins, every one of them older than me.
When Kuok’s father passed away from a heart attack in 1949, Kuok and his family formed a new company. Thus began the era of Kuok Brothers Limited.
At that time, Tong Seng and Co. was the rice agent and distributor for the southern third of the Johor state. To the BMA, however, Kuok Brothers was simply a newly-incorporated business, and they demanded a banker’s guarantee of $100,000 before they passed over the previous contract.
With the contract up in the air, business floundered as they struggled to come up with the required amount. Here, Kuok’s previous connections helped them tide over those difficult times — Kuok and his father were close to the Johor royal family, as they had supplied necessary food-stuffs for the state. He managed to borrow 3,000 dollars from the Johor royal family in order to keep the business going. Eventually, the company was helped by a loan from Chairman Chin Sophonpanich of Bangkok Bank, which unlocked bank credit for their trading.
The episode with Chin is instructive of the era. Kuok was having trouble getting credit from the British banks, who discriminated against anyone who wasn’t white. He was also having trouble with the Overseas-Chinese banks, who didn’t trust outsiders — Kuok was from Johor, and the Overseas-Chinese banks were based in Singapore. But one day, Bangkok Bank chairman Chin Sophonpanich paid a visit to Singapore, and Kuok joined a group of rice traders who met him at the airport. Chin promised to visit all of them. In his memoirs, Kuok writes:
I assumed this was just a pleasantry but, sure enough, three or four days later, my office in Singapore received a phone call to say Chairman Chin of Bangkok Bank would like to see me. So I replied, “Fine, I’m free” and waited. Chin came over with two aides, and we sat and chatted.
I later realized why Chin made that effort. Instead of waiting for people to visit him in the splendour of his office, he was actually checking out every shop. He wanted to see and feel how you operated, how you placed your desk, the sense of drive in the office, the atmosphere — and he had to do this personally.
It’s not just the physical appointment of the shop. When you enter a man’s office or shop, you can get a feel, a psychic feel, of how well that firm is doing or may one day be doing. It’s an abstract thing. Can you feel something in the air? Is the firm charged with good electricity, or is it dull, fading, or dying?
Chin seemed very pleased with what he saw. Straight away he said, “What kind of business are you doing?”
And after I replied, he said, “Now look here. I’ll give you ten million for letters of credit. And I’ll give you banker’s acceptances up to one half of that, five million. These trust-receipt facilities will enable you to draw the goods. Sell them first, and then repay me the money.”
Once Kuok had that letter of credit, he could finally get in with the other banks.
Kuok Brothers were traders and distributors for basic foodstuffs: rice, sugar, and wheat flour. In 1953, they became rice agents of the Malayan Government in Singapore. As the company continued to grow, Kuok Brothers soon established a presence in Singapore, Johor, Kuala Lumpur, and Malacca.
The company set themselves apart by forming good relations with trading firms in Singapore. Kuok made sure to always act honourably during these trades: he paid on time, and sought short grace periods, a contrast to the norm of debts being extended by weeks and months. By developing good relations in the trade, they managed to gain a slight competitive edge. Kuok reveals:
If you met with a good seller, he would give you a silent discount not known to the rest of the trade because he knew his money and goods were safe with you. It’s just common-sense business.
But Kuok was not satisfied. In those days, there were no rice futures, only trade in physicals. In order to get better information, Kuok made regular trips to Bangkok from 1953-1958 to form strong personal ties with the rice traders there, who had a good feel for the market. He watched, first-hand, how they did business. He observed their successes and failures. Kuok didn't have someone to teach him, but he took everything as a part of the learning process. One businessman that a young Kuok took to was a Bangkok rice trader by the name of Ang Toon Chew, who by savvy and persistence became the largest rice trader in Thailand. Kuok calls him “one of the finest Chinese businessmen I have ever come across.” He writes:
My early visits to Bangkok followed a similar routine. By seven-thirty every morning, most of the rice merchants were already attending to business. They would come to see me, as I was a fairly important rice buyer from Southeast Asia. Each one would take turns: Tomorrow morning you have breakfast with me, they’d say. They’d take me for Teochew congee, and of course we’d chat over breakfast. Then by 9am I’d be in Ang’s shop. I would just sit there and observe how he bought rice. People came with rice samples. Ang would put his hand through the grains, and then he would bargain. Sometimes, he would break off the bargaining if it grew too heated. He would relax over a cup of tea, and start again.
(...) I learned much about human behaviour and resilience from my Bangkok experience. Physical tiredness was simply not in their vocabulary. Ang’s shop was two stories high. He conducted business downstairs but he didn’t sleep upstairs. He stayed in a lodging house half a kilometer away on Songwad Road in the Chinese quarter. Rent was cheap and he could get masseuses to massage him any time he liked.
From Ang, who didn’t flaunt his wealth, I learned humility. He worked hard; not intensively, but for long hours. Then he would have a very nice dinner and, of course, I would look forward to dinner with him every night. I wanted to observe what made the man tick.
If I had a business mentor in life, it was Ang. I can’t say that I learned much from Father, except that I observed how shrewd and gentlemanly he was in dealing with his customers.
Kuok explains, "I have always felt that wisdom is in the air. Structured learning is fine. But you can pick, you can distill wisdom by yourself. However, to do that, you have to hone your senses, listen more carefully, smell more deeply, see more sharply, and through that try to distill the wisdom from the air."
By the mid-1950s, Kuok Brothers had hit a small plateau. By focusing mainly on rice, an essential crop, the company achieved a certain amount of stability, but was also prevented from making high profits. This was a stark contrast to sugar, a more volatile commodity with prices that "moved up and down like a yo-yo." Years later Kuok wrote:
(...) I could see that there really wasn’t much margin or profit to be made in rice. Even a 14- or 15-year-old could set up a shop to buy and sell rice, so the competition was horrendous. It struck me as the least skilled of all trades. As a result, you couldn’t grow very big. Every farmer looks after his own little plot; at best, a number of farmers might form a cooperative if they have enough sense amongst themselves to set up a jointly owned mill. Rice mills require very small capital and don’t lend themselves to economies of scale, so the barriers to entry in the trade are very low.
Rice did not normally experience wild price swings. Imagine: if rice were a volatile commodity, there would often be widespread famine. Did the price of rice double during the year? If the price of rice was £40 a ton (in those days the trade with Thailand was still in sterling, not in US dollars), could it go up to £80? Could it drop from £40 a ton to £20? The chances were not that great.
As I also traded in sugar, I began to see that sugar was a far more volatile commodity than rice. Sugar prices moved up and down like a yo-yo. As a trader, you can only make windfall profits if a commodity is volatile.
Moving forward, Kuok decided to shift his focus to sugar.
His first big break in the sugar trade came in 1958. Mitsui and Co., a trading company from Japan, approached Kuok through a mutual contact from the flour trade. Mitsui was involved in a barter deal with India, trading chemical fertilisers to India in return for white sugar. Kuok was called in as Mitsui heard that “a crazy young man called Robert Kuok was willing to trade in sugar.” At that time, this was the largest deal in the history of Malaysia and Singapore — 30,000 tons of sugar. This deal was sweetened by Malaysia’s preferential duty that granted $44 duty advantage per ton of sugar from any British Commonwealth country, including India.
But this was dampened by an unexpected competitor — Lim Kai, a sugar agent who was backed by the Chinese government itself. Kuok had assumed he would have no competition in the Malaysia sugar market, but Lim’s import of Chinese sugar ended up flooding the market. Kuok had no choice but to ask Mitsui to cut sugar prices, lowering his share of the profit.
Needless to say, this was disappointing for Kuok. But a reversal of fate occurred a few weeks later, when he received a sudden cable from China.
Kuok rushed to Hong Kong. There, the Chinese confided in him that they couldn’t compete against the sugar Kuok was importing from India as long as he was enjoying a preferential tariff. Instead, they wanted to collude with Kuok on a new contract. At the time, mainland Chinese traders weren’t allowed to visit Malaysia or Singapore. From the early 1960s, Kuok filled in this gap for China, becoming the real buyer behind the Lim Kai agency. The Chinese negotiated contracts directly with him for each block sale of 30,000 tons or 50,000 tons — which, since Kuok was also the buyer for Indian sugar, meant that Kuok could decide when and how much he paid for Chinese imports, guaranteeing profitable trade from the two countries.
The initial Mitsui deal also led Kuok to deeper involvement in Indian sugar, forming a contractual relationship with the Indian Sugar Mills Association while also buying sugar from the State Trading Corporation. By importing directly from India, Kuok could make use of Malaysia’s preferential duty to compete with other merchants.
These preferential duties were really Commonwealth preferential duties — India and Malaysia were still tied together as former colonies of the British empire. Such duties were a function of global trade at the time.
*
It was through Mitsui that Kuok got his breakthrough opportunity — sugar refining.
In the autumn of 1958, Kuok received an unexpected phone call from Mike Horie of Mitsui, while Kuok was having a holiday in Penang. Even though it was a vacation with his entire family, the call was so important that he rushed back to Singapore that very evening. The offer came as such:
Mitsui and Nissin Seito (Nissin Sugar Manufacturing Co) had attended an economic seminar in Tokyo at which Tan Siew Sin, the Malaysian Minister of Finance, had invited the Japanese to set up factories in newly independent Malaysia. One of the Japanese companies had asked whether this included sugar refining with tariff protection, and Siew Sin had responded affirmatively. The Japanese had taken copious notes.
Mitsui asked if I would like to become their partner in such a project. I thought this was a godsend opportunity, and agreed immediately.
[...] The Japanese said they would return to Tokyo and draft a letter of application, but we should form that very day the spirit of sansha (three companies) and agree on a sansha spirit of unity. The three companies were Kuok Brothers, Mitsui and Nissin. They proposed that Mitsui and Nissin each take 20 percent and Kuok Brothers 26 percent, leaving 34 percent for other investors.
Then Mitsui sent me a poorly crafted draft of a letter of application to the Malaysian Government. It was written in incomprehensible English. With Matsumoto’s permission, I rewrote the entire letter in language that the Malaysian British officers could read and appreciate (most of the key economic officials in the Government were still from Britain, Australia or New Zealand). We agreed that the joint-venture company would be called Malayan Sugar Manufacturing Co Ltd (MSM). In the letter, I introduced a final paragraph asserting that for this industry to find its feet, it was essential that it be accorded full tariff protection. The three parties signed the letter and submitted it to the Ministry of Economic Affairs (later renamed the Ministry of Commerce and Industry) in early 1959.
In July 1959, we received an official letter on government letterhead signed by the Deputy Director of the Industrial Development Division. It confirmed that licenses had been approved for us and for another refinery, with tariff protection. However, we still needed to obtain formal tariff protection approval from the Tariff Advisory Committee.
On receiving that official government letter of approval, it was all hands on deck. The Japanese quickly invited Kuok to Tokyo to further hash out the details of the project, but that initial sansha spirit of unity seemed to have disappeared.
The first morning, we went to a meeting in Mitsui’s office. Philip and I sat on one side of a long table. Ranged against us on the other side were about ten Japanese: Lawyers, accountants, a managing director from Nissin, a few from Mitsui and so on. They presented us from a very lopsided pro-forma agreement. It said, Nissin is to receive a technical guidance fee for ten years, at one percent of the selling price, renewable for another ten years, and to send 100 staff from Japan based on Japanese salaries; Mitsui was to be the sole raw-sugar buying agent, one percent commission on purchase price; Kuoks, we appoint you sole selling agents of the refined sugar in Malaysia, one percent commission.
I thought, they’re keeping all the plums, conferring lush franchises on themselves and handing us zero. We naturally were going to be the ones to sell the sugar in the Malaysian market, as I was already a major sugar trader there. So now Kuoks, equal partners in the sansha, would be no more than the selling agent in our own country! If they didn’t give the agency to us, MSM would have had to give it to someone else in Malaysia. Therefore, they were only offering me something that they could not handle themselves.
The seller of raw sugar always pays a commission, but here Mitsui even wanted another one percent commission from the buyer. Nissin was in essence saying: sugar refining is a very complex, intricate industry. I laughed to myself. I didn’t have to study chemistry to know that this was nonsense.
Kuok and his brother Philip were enraged at the unfairness. But Kuok knew how important this deal was, so he held both of them back.
That evening, I told Philip, “Phil, we’re being clobbered. It’s a case of, if we don’t like it they won’t go with us. Without them coming with us we don’t know how to do sugar refining.” So I said, “Let’s go with them. We’ll just massage a bit of the vileness out of it, but I don’t think we’ll get many concessions. We’ll just go through the motions.”
MSM was slated to become the very first local sugar refinery, and held enormous potential.
Kuok knew this, and he pulled out all stops to turn this potential into reality. Kuok sold into a fragmented local sugar market of 50-70 traders. He neutralised their opposition by approaching a few friends. Nai Seng, run by Ang Toon Chew, and Wah Seong Ltd, owned by Tan Kim Yeow, agreed to each purchase about ten percent of MSM’s shares. For Kuok’s own shares, he invested $1,560,000 for his 26 percent stake, despite protests from his accountant. Kuok yelled at him: “Don’t be foolish! Now we have a strong incentive to work harder to find that money!”
However, a long battle for tariff protection ensued. Even after the British granted independence to Malaysia in 1957, the British still remained in charge of the economy. Kuok writes:
When I applied for tariff protection in 1959, the British and other white civil servants blocked me for over two years. Sugar, being an agricultural crop, is subject to the vagaries of nature. In disastrous crop years, the volatility of sugar is such that prices can easily escalate as much as five times. Most sugar-producing countries grow sugar mainly for domestic consumption and then dump any surplus on the international market. If you have a refinery, you can be blown to bits in years of surplus, which occur 80-90 percent of the time. It was obvious that tariff protection would ultimately be given. The British civil servants, however, were simply trying to delay us, hoping that we would give up and go away.
The white civil servants were protecting the interests of Taikoo (Swire) of Hong Kong and Tate & Lyle, the sugar kings of England. Tate & Lyle had enjoyed strong tariff protection in the British market for over 200 years. And yet Tate & Lyle had the audacity to send a cable to the Tariff Advisory Committee in Malaysia strongly opposing tariff protection for MSM.
But the British could not be in charge forever. Kuok’s break came in the form of a new Minister of Commerce and Industry: Khir Johari, a ‘young, energetic’ Kedah Malay. Kuok complained to Khir that the British were blocking tariff protection. Khir listened. In 1962, the TAC finally held tariff protection hearings, and soon granted full protection by banning imports of refined sugar, a policy that continues to this day.
When Kuok learnt that they were winning, he went a step further:
When I got word that we were winning our case, I went again to see Khir Johari, I said to him, “The Japanese foisted a very unfair agreement onto me.”
He said, “Send me a copy.” He had civil servants go through it. Then, in his letter granting tariff protection to MSM, he incorporated a few paragraphs stating, “Before the plant can be built, all agreements signed with foreign partners must be vetted and approved by this Ministry.” In other words, his Ministry had the right to suggest amendments if it felt the agreement was too one sided.
Predictably, the Japanese got very alarmed, and they came to see Kuok in Singapore. Kuok refused to back down. Eventually, the meeting ended with a far fairer deal for the Kuok Brothers — a lower technical guidance fee was to be paid to Nissin, and raw sugar-buying rights were given to the Kuoks. But Mitsui was mad.
Even as the agreement was revised and finalised, both the Japanese and British continued to hound Kuok. On one of Kuok’s trips to London, a man from Mitsui’s broker, Czarnikow, came to confront him.
Beckett [a senior director] was a very severe-looking man. We sat down and exchanged one or two simple pleasantries. Then he started to lecture me quite rudely. He said their relationship with Mitsui went back almost to the time of the founding of Czarnikow. His message was, "Who are you? We are such old friends. Nobody can break our friendship."
I interposed at one stage and said, "Who is suggesting breaking your friendship?"
Then Beckett said, "Why should you start a sugar refinery in Malaysia? Your country is importing white sugar from Tate & Lyle and Taikoo of Hong Kong nicely. Why do you want to set up the refinery?""
I was furious. I replied, "It is none of your business!"
A similar experience with Mitsui occurred with the president of the company.
I was in my London hotel room when I received a call from the London office of Mitsui and Co. The President of Mitsui London, Ikeda, invited me to lunch.
We sat down at a City restaurant. Japanese are a little more polite, and Ikeda spoke a few pleasantries. Then a similar lecture began. "Mr Kuok," he said, "I want you to know that where Mitsui is concerned, our best friend in London in Czarnikow. Mitsui will never source sugar through anybody else in the world except Czarnikow."
I could see the drift of conversation. I said, "That is, of course, every right of Mitsui."
He didn’t like what I said, so he went on to bully me: "Where this refinery is concerned, we will make every effort to see that all the raw sugar is bought through Czarnikow."
I almost screamed at him, "Do you think you won the War? Do you think Malaysia is a colony of Japan? Did you invite me to lunch to insult me?" I threw my napkin on the table and walked out.
It infuriated Kuok that the British and Japanese thought they could control independent Malaysia, but it was already set in stone: the dominant player on the Malaysian sugar scene would be MSM.
Already, by 1961, 80 percent of Malaysia’s 250,000 tons a year of refined sugar passed through my hands. Until 1964, China sold 50,000-80,000 tons a year to Malaysia through me. Even Tate & Lyle and Taikoo appointed me their sugar agents in 1963. They knew that, in a year or two, I would stop all business with them since my tariff-protected refinery would supply all the white sugar. MSM dominated the sugar market of Malaysia from about the mid-1960s, knocking out the competition.
MSM was the first standalone sugar refinery in Southeast Asia (Thailand and Indonesia had sugar mills with small adjunct refineries). Our initial volume was 400 tons a day melt, or some 140,000 tons a year, which quickly expanded. Refineries in Europe and America barely work more than 270 days a year. We pushed our refineries to work about 330 days a year. The demand for refined sugar in Malaysia kept escalating, so we kept escalating.
Today, MSM refines 3,000 tons a day in Malaysia. By the time I sold it to a Malaysian government entity, we were selling sugar more cheaply in Malaysia than the price of sugar in Thailand. We owned the refinery for over 45 years. I would say that we made in all about three billion Malaysian dollars, which is a very satisfying reward for our hard work.
Kuok’s success in sugar was mostly due to tariff protection. The ban on refined sugar imports, as well as the previous preferential duty on sugar, were Import-Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) policies which the government made to support the development of a domestic industry. In his 2007 book Asian Godfathers, author Joe Studwell claims that “ISI did not nurture small local manufacturers into larger, internationally competitive manufacturers, it simply reinforced the position of the trading-based élite of the colonial era.” This nominally included Kuok. These same policies later continued to ease Kuok’s success in sugar milling, flour milling and shipping.
On the other hand, Malaysia’s sugar tariff was necessary for the burgeoning economy. Kuok was nothing if not shrewd: sugar was an important — but not essential — commodity, and consumption was likely to grow as Malaysia prospered. While the import tariff ensured the success of MSM, it also stabilised local sugar prices — exactly as intended by the government.
After the tariffs, Kuok’s MSM rapidly took over the sugar market. By 1961, 80 percent of Malaysia’s 250,000 tons a year of refined sugar passed through the company. To his credit, Kuok didn’t just sit on his laurels after winning protection. To quote Studwell: “Robert Kuok has companies that grow sugar, that refine sugar, that make the bags in which the sugar is put, that trade sugar, that market sugar, as well as ships that transport sugar.” In 1964, one of London’s evening papers called Kuok ‘the Sugar King of the East’ — on account of the fact that he was one of a very few totally integrated sugar-trader industrialists in the world. This was a name that stuck. Looking back, Kuok recalled, “Sugar gave me the busiest time in my working life. It started in 1958, and it didn’t really ease up for 35 years.”
Throughout these years, Kuok continued travelling to learn from other traders. By 1960, this included traders in New York and London. He made one-to-two trips a year to London to learn how to manage raw sugar costs and trade sugar, and he started to experiment in the London market by buying small units.
By 1963, he was confident in his abilities. That year, he made an annual profit of 14 million Malaysian dollars, the equivalent of just under US$5 million by trading in the commodity houses in London. This exorbitant wealth would set the foundation for many, many years to come.
*
However, business expansion wasn’t always smooth sailing for Kuok.
Kuok entered the plywood business in 1961. The Japanese refused to enter this business with him, and Kuok carried on alone.
Kuok soon realised that plywood was completely different from foodstuffs. In foodstuffs, products were virtually unchanging. But in plywood, every buyer had vastly different demands — different veneers, glues, waterproofings. Kuok reflected, years later:
Toiling in the plywood industry was like being born a poor, squint-eyed carpenter who inherits from his father an unbalanced table. The carpenter can’t work properly, so he puts the table on its side and saws at one leg. He stands the table up and it still won’t balance, so he keeps on sawing the legs. Eventually, all he’s left with is the top of the table sitting on the floor.
In other words, there is always unevenness in the plant. You’re never able to maximize efficiency in the mill, yet the equipment depreciates every day. Plywood is a terrible, terrible business! You can only succeed if you have the wealth of the Amazon forest behind you, in which case you’re really making money from forestry. Humbled, I realised why the Japanese didn’t want to enter the plywood industry with me.
Kuok exited the business in 1968.
Ultimately, Kuok’s profits in sugar gave him the freedom to expand into other sectors. By the mid-1960s, he was venturing into flour milling, shipping, aviation, and steel. He shifted to real estate in Hong Kong and hotels in the 70s.
Unlike many other tycoons, Kuok became known for operating in many different regional markets. His expansion was steady, over many decades, with a variety of different partners. But that narrative is for another day.
Timeline
1923: Kuok Hock Nien (Robert) born in JB, Malaya
1929: Great Depression
1937: Japan declares war on China
1939: Kuok graduates from English College in JB
1941: Japan invades Malaya
July 1942: Kuok starts work for Mitsubishi Trading
1945: Japan surrenders, Kuok joins Tong Seng & Co.
Sep 1946: Tong Seng becomes in charge of gov rice, sugar, and flour for southern Johor state
Jan 1949: Kuok family establishes Kuok Brothers Ltd.
1953: Kuok Brothers become gov rice agents of the Malayan Gov in SG
1955: Shift of focus from rice to sugar
1957: Malaysia independence
1958: Kuok Brothers sign agreement to start a sugar refinery
1963: Kuok makes first fortune on London sugar market
1964 Aug: Malayan Sugar Manufacturing (MSM) established
1961: Kuok enters the plywood business
Sources
Robert Kuok: A Memoir by Robert Kuok and Andrew Tanzer
Asian Godfathers, Joe Studwell
Robert Kuok, Forbes Profile (archive.is link, retrieved April 2025)