Name: How an ‘accidental businesswoman’ transformed one of Singapore’s oldest companies
Uploaded: 2025-11-01T18:21:10.000Z
Duration: 14 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Christine Tan in Penang, Malaysia, to speak with you.

Kim, who is leading one of the oldest companies in Singapore and how she's transforming the company into a real estate powerhouse.

Chugae Kim has been running straits trading since 2008 after her family's investment company Tessity Group took control following a highly public bidding war.

Since then, she's taken the legacy tin smelting business that was founded founded in 1887 and transformed it to focus more on becoming a major player in real estate and hospitality.

It's currently constructing its most ambitious project to date, Straits City, an integrated development in the Malaysian state of Penang.

It sits just across the water from the popular tourist destination that is Penang Island.

Straits Trading is developing the 40 acre site, worth US$614 million.

And the project coincides with the state government's Vision 2030 plan for the region.

Straits City is your flagship development project.

Is this development going to be a big game changer for Straits Trading as well as for Penang?

I wouldn't say it's a game changer for the whole of Straits Trading.

It's a game changer for our development because they've never done something on such a scale.

It's a game changer for Penang because you know, this whole area, which was at one time looked at as the poorer cousin of Penang island, is now coming up.

And you can see that with Penang Central on the left, which is a transport hub, access to Street City will be very easy.

We're still in the early stages of development.

What is your vision for the entire project once it's completed by 2038?

My vision is for this to be a CBD, an alternative CBD to the island.

And it's logical because the island is far too congested.

It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is attractive, but

at the same time that restricts the changes you can make.

Whereas down here is really a white site.

Your late grandfather Danjun Duan was the very reason why you engineered that dramatic takeover of Straits training back in 2008.

If he were alive today and seeing this development here in Penang, what would be his reaction?

I like to think that he would be pleased, but

I don't think it would just be this development.

I like to think that he'd be pleased because we've done something with the company, We've transformed it and we've also used existing resources to try to make it relevant for people.

So with the improvement in the smelting technology, we're now decommissioning the old smelter.

We're going to add the available land to the land that Streets Trading owns and we're going to do a much bigger development.

Hopefully it will meet the needs of the people that are going to live here.

We've stuck to budget, so that's all right.

The problem with surprises really is because of external circumstance.

To be fair, the US China conflict has played to our advantage because of all the factories and businesses that have set up here.

On the other hand, things could go wrong as well.

There could be a real war, which I think is a low risk, but you never know.

So it's very difficult to tell at this point in time.

And of course there could be a financial war.

And with the financial system then you have currency fluctuations, you'll have interest rates going haywire.

So these are all the variables that could happen.

This development is part of your 16 year journey to transform Straits Trading into a diversified investment conglomerate.

Focus on high yields in real estate and property.

Do you still harbor ambitions to be the next Blackstone of Asia?

What I do hope is I hope to build a property ecosystem.

So right now we have a fundraising arm which is still incipient.

I'd say we still haven't quite got everything there because we're also trying to raise money from the retail public through fractional investments.

We have a real estate fund called Streets Real Estate and that one invests in.

A lot of times it invests in completed properties, repurposes them and then sells it.

Then we have a development arm called SDPL, Streets Development Properties Ltd.

Which is developing properties and this is the largest so far.

And then we have a small stake in esr, which is a property asset manager.

We're trying to build a full ecosystem where people can invest in different things.

As a real estate investor, you own Straits real estate with 2 billion Singapore dollars worth of assets spread out across Asia.

You also have a 3.9% stake in the enlarged ESR, which is Asia Pacific's largest real estate and asset manager with about 156 billion USD of assets.

You also own business and retail parks in the uk.

What else would you like to add to your real estate portfolio.

I don't look at it as adding another asset.

I think about it as improving the existing businesses because we have the skeletal framework of an ecosystem and we would like to deepen and try to be relevant to what the public needs.

So for example, in streets real estate, we take all buildings, we repurpose them and we sell them.

We've always thought of it as being economically efficient, but.

But we also realized that it's environmentally friendly because you're not pulling down a building and rebuilding.

Where we think we can go deeper would be in the area of work.

the nature of work has changed, so you need to make changes there.

And the other area we're looking at is what we can do for an aging population.

In many developed countries, you have populations that are aging.

And the demands of an aging population would be quite different from that with a.

Let's talk about your tin smelting business.

That's where your legacy roots come from.

There have been lots of questions about whether it remains a good fit within the overall group because it's been slow to unlock value and generate returns.

You've turned down office for Malaysia smelting over the years.

Are you still sticking to your gut instinct?

I believe that we, we have started to see a big turnaround in Malaysian smelting.

The we have seen a resurgence is multiple.

First of all, a lot of tin mining and smelting companies have closed down, so there's less competition.

Second, because of the electric vehicles and electronics, there's a huge demand for tin in batteries and people don't realize that they're looking at lithium and cobalt.

Third, we've discovered new technologies which has improved efficiency and that actually has improved margins.

Finally, we will be decommissioning the tin smelter here and we have started up the new smelter in Klang.

So when this finally shuts down, we will have released a lot of land which can then be redeveloped.

So all in, I'm confident I made the right decision.

What happens if you get an outrageous offer for your tin smelting business?

I think if it's outrageous, I will have to look at it very seriously.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How an ‘accidental businesswoman’ transformed one of Singapore’s oldest companies

relevant

ultimate

figure

improve