2018 09 01 forbes asia

Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche: “We are making the lives of construction people better.” SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 23... Amazon is closing in on Apple to become the world’s most valua

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SEPTEMBER 2018 • WWW.FORBES.COM

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FOR PRESS METAL BHD.

A MORNING WITH JEFF BEZOS

CEO Koon Poh Keong

11 | FACT & COMMENT // STEVE FORBES

Time to terminate “assisted dying.”

THE FAB 50

38 | THE LIST

China is squeezing out the world, accounting for 30 of our best, big publicly traded companies

BY JOHN KOPPISCH AND ANDREA MURPHY

39 | PRESSING FOR SUCCESS

Malaysian aluminum company Press Metal dominates the Southeast Asian market

BY ANIS SHAKIRAH MOHD MUSLIMIN

47 | NEW TO THE CLASS

Notable newcomers to our list Plus: companies that may soon be Fab 50 members.

COMPANIES, PEOPLE

14 | POLITICAL ROAST

Taiwanese-owned cofee chain draws a VIP who is of-limits on the mainland

BY RALPH JENNINGS

16 | WHERE E-CASH IS KING

China’s fintech giants are consolidating their gains and using their capital heft

—Avenue Supermart’s loyal

customers help launch it onto our

Fab 50 list

COVER PHOTOGRAPH

18 | SEATS, THEN SERVICES

The founder of co-working startup Kr Space says growth has to come before profits

34 | BITMAIN’S MAIN MAN

The cryptocurrency-mining billionaire nobody has heard of

BY JASMINE TENG

52 | A REALLY BIG SCORE

Can esports legend Andy Dinh continue to dominate as billionaire moguls enter the arena?

BY MATT PEREZ

54 | BEST UNDER A BILLION: BLS

Shikhar Aggarwal builds a global challenger on dad’s frustration with lengthy visa queues

BY ANURADHA RAGHUNATHAN

64 | TWEENPRENEURS

Social gaming unicorn Roblox teaches kids the rudiments of coding

BY ALEX KNAPP

68 | BETTER OVER TIME

Sincere Watch scion embraces a new idea: sell older models

BY PAMELA AMBLER

77 | BILLIONAIRES TO BE: CIGARETTE BREAKERS

The cofounders of Juul Labs have cornered the U.S e-cigarette market

80 | GADGETMAN // BEN SIN

Poker fanatic Xu Ke launches Ono, a social network based on blockchain technology

THE PHILIPPINES’ 50 RICHEST

92 | GOOD EATS IN MYANMAR

A hungry 30 Under 30 entrepreneur comes home to feed his people

BY JANE A PETERSON

94 | FROM THE EXPERTS

Art, booze and timepieces to buy, hold and sell

—HTET MYET OO,

30 Under 30 member (2016) and

founder of Rangoon Teahouse and

other restaurants in Myanmar

Even many of the favorable

reviewers of the hit movie Crazy Rich Asians concede it is familiar romantic-comedy fare from Hollywood, save for the faces Yet therein lies the basis of a cultural moment, as Asian characters assume mainstream roles for

a largely Western audience

Of direct interest to Forbes Asia readers is the backdrop of the story (earlier a book by Kevin Kwan): the tussle between traditional and modern mores in

an extremely wealthy Singaporean Chinese family Of course this ilm is an ing caricature, although I trust it inspires conjectured likenesses to real clans Singa-pore itself appears in several glam cameos he vast ictional fortune itself, however, popularizes what this magazine has been reporting for years: the Asia-Paciic region’s extraordinary personal riches

entertain-If this cinematic staple is nevertheless a breakthrough on the far side of the Paciic,

it is not the only one lately for those of Asian background Amid the continuing and ever remarkable rise of immigrants and their ofspring from East and South Asia in North America, we are seeing their academic, artistic and inancial success extend gradually into the civic realm A growing (if belated) presence in public and political life, through new candidates and constituencies, is rounding out the “cast” of North America’s real-life drama

Note two recent cases of similar theme: irst, an attempt by New York City oicials

to soten the admission criteria for its prestigious specialized high schools, where a dardized-test cutof has resulted in a bulge of ethnic Asian enrollment And second, a lawsuit aimed at the fuzzy measures by which Harvard University has arguably reduced the number of its ethnically Asian matriculants (Harvard being a proxy for elite colleges generally) In each case, Asians have been unusually outspoken in the debate

stan-To be sure, solidarity is one thing, but tribalism is another, and such a scourge can take both let- and right-wing forms It can cloud legitimate policy considerations

Take the increasing resistance in the West to mainland Chinese economic forays: Is this a bigoted response or an expression of strategic or security concerns? A culture warrior might see the former—ater all, look at China’s great companies on our Fab 50 (p 38) But what of other Asian nations also recoiling from Beijing’s push?

he world is getting smaller, and battles for turf are to be expected Competition that is open and objective under the rules will make for happier endings

Tim FergusonEditor, forbes asiaglobaleditor@forbes.com

FORBES MAGAZINE

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Loren Feldman ENTREPRENEURS

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DEPARTMENT HEADS

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Jessica Bohrer VP, EDITORIAL COUNSEL

FOUNDED IN 1917

B.C Forbes, Editor-in-Chief (1917-54)

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Contributing Editors

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Steve Forbes

Singapore’s Property Moguls Edge Out Facebook Billionaire For Top Spot

200 Best Asian Companies Under A Billion

Singapore’s Shoebox Apartment King Jams Into A Tight Squeeze

Myanmar Tycoon Thein Tun Faces Business Woes In Crisis-Torn Country

Singapore’s Wealthy Families Fund Hangouts For Millennials

Chinese Are Flocking To Gaming Site Bilibili, But Can It Make Money?

READERS SAY

THE INTEREST GRAPHOur list of Singapore’s wealthiest ran away with the most Web hits from last issue:

“I am not a crony; I am straight.”

“Bilibili is like

a community

of young fans.”

“I knew I could make money if we did it our way.”

51, 141 page views

7,612 11,518

2014 I did a stupid thing—I bought the Myanmar Times.’ A ringing endorsement of the newsroom from the boss.” Regarding the business climate that Tun is facing in Myanmar, the International Campaign for the Rohingya posted this on Face-book: “Further proof that genocide is bad for busi-ness International condemnation of the Burmese government’s genocide of the Rohingya has led

to widespread cancellations by Western tourists More ominously, foreign direct investment also remains well of its 2015 highs and property values are down.” Regarding our story about four generations of women in

h ailand running a business (“Riverboat Queens,” p 30), this from “Out & About

in Southeast Asia” on Facebook: “It’s really interesting to read about the hard-nosed businesspeople in charge of such a venerable tourist institution—and the fact that women have led this company for four generations now is an arresting hook.”

CORRECTIONS: In “Riverboat Queens” we incorrectly calculated the number of

passengers carried by Supatra & Chao Phraya Express: h e correct number is 1 million a month, not 100,000 Our blurb about John Lim (“Singapore’s 50 richest,”

p 83) stated that he owns a third of ARA Asset Management; he owns 19.85%

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to actually kill patients, as is happening in Belgium, Holland and elsewhere.

Research shows that many euthanasia and assisted-suicide victims are sufering from depression hey should be treated, not abandoned As for physical sufering, it’s hardly beyond the capabilities of mod-ern medicine to efectively manage pain with older, well-established medications,

as well as newer, better drugs

It’s true that in the U.S we have a ous opioid crisis Nonetheless, the response shouldn’t be a diminution in pain management but, alterna-tively, a focus on reducing and eventually eliminating the abuses

seri-he temptation to use euthanasia as a solution will only increase as populations age and as cash-strapped govern-ments and insurers scramble to ind ways to reduce growing healthcare costs It should be axiomatic that life is sacro-sanct, whether or not you are religious

In recent times we have seen enormous medical

advanc-es that not only prolong life but also improve the quality of life as we age he answer to the rising costs of healthcare

is the creation of genuine free markets, which always turn scarcity into abundance here is precious little in the way of free markets in healthcare hird parties, primarily govern-ments and insurers—not the patients—still dominate his

is beginning to change in the U.S Rapidly efecting this transformation should be our urgent goal, not surrender-ing to rationing or descending into the pit of euthanasia and

“assisted dying.”

Morally and pragmatically, such practices have no place

in a truly civilized and humane society

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 11

TIME TO TERMINATE

“ASSISTED DYING”

BY STEVE FORBES, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

“With all thy getting, get understanding”

FACT & COMMENT

In 2002 Belgium legalized the murderously

chilling act of euthanasia, whereby doctors

and nurses kill patients with their supposed

consent Holland had formally done the

same the year before his practice, all too

reminiscent of what Nazi Germany did

be-fore WWII to the mentally handicapped and

to people with very serious disabilities, is

jus-tiied these days not by Hitlerian theories of

“purifying the race,” of course, but as a “hu-

mane” way to deal with those who are

suf-fering mortal illnesses and in extreme pain

Many thousands of patients have been disposed of since

Holland and Belgium enacted these morally repugnant

laws Belgium now allows euthanasia to be applied even to

children, acknowledging recently that between Jan 1, 2016,

and Dec 31, 2017, two children, ages 9 and 11, who were

alicted with a brain tumor and cystic ibrosis, respectively,

and a 17-year-old, who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy,

had been put to death Apologists say these kids gave their

consent, as did their parents Good God! Are we to believe

that youngsters should be making such decisions?

Holland has been hit with scandals in which patients were

administered lethal injections without their consent, in order

to free up “needed” hospital beds Ater all, the reasoning

went, these people were going to die soon, anyway In Belgium,

according to a news report, a member of the Federal

Commis-sion for Euthanasia Control & Evaluation resigned last year

“in protest at the unchecked killings of dementia patients.”

What’s happening here is an ugly, slippery slope Instead

of working to alleviate the tribulations of the alicted and

innovating ever better ways to do this, we simply “put them

out of their misery,” the way we do with household pets

It’s not only in Belgium and the Netherlands that we’re seeing

this awful phenomenon A chronically ill man in Canada is suing

the government because medical personnel allegedly and

ille-gally tried to coerce him into going the assisted-suicide route to

save money “Why force me to end my life?” the plaintif asked

It’s one thing for people to declare in writing when they

are in good health and of sound mind that no “heroic”

mea-sures are to be taken, that medical staf should “let nature

take its course.” But it’s quite another for medical personnel

Passion Can Become Your Job

John Tamny (Gateway Editions, $28.99) Everyone, regardless of age, income and occupation, will find this short, pithy and wisdom-rich book inspir-ing and instructive

FACT & COMMENT STEVE FORBES

John Heubusch (Howard Books, $26) This fantastic tale of mystery and con-

spiracy will have you flipping pages

at a breakneck pace to find out what

happens next, with your heart racing

as if you were running the 400-meter

race at the Olympics

The novel is a sequel to last year’s

spectacular bestseller The Shroud

Conspiracy In this second

install-ment Heubusch continues the story

of Jon Bondurant, who, despite being

a skeptic of the legend, found himself

investigating the Shroud of Turin, a

relic many believers take to be the

burial cloth of Christ

Bondurant quickly realizes that

the shroud is not only authentic but

also the nexus of a global conspiracy

A clone has been created from DNA contained within the shroud that car-ries a plague aptly named “the Devil’s Sweat.” The aim of the conspiracy is the ultimate cataclysm: to wipe out humanity via this unholy laboratory experiment The race is on to save the human race

Does this apocalyptic plot sound too outlandish? It’s a tribute to Heu-busch’s considerable gifts as a compel-ling storyteller that the characters and events feel all too real

I have only one question for the author: When does the next book come out? F

Its thesis is simple yet

pro-found: Greater prosperity gives

more and more people the

oppor-tunity to match work with passion,

the kind of work that “has you

ex-cited on Sunday nights.” Critical to

this “luxury” is a growing

econo-my “The freer people are to earn

as much as they can and keep it,

the more likely it is that everyone

will have the opportunity to make

a living from his own unique skills

and intelligence.”

The way the author—a

long-time and valued contributor to

both Forbes magazine and forbes

com—illustrates this optimistic

viewpoint is exciting and

origi-nal Sports is one area that’s been

expanding as we’ve become more

affluent, with vastly greater needs

at all levels of play for coaches,

assistants, training specialists,

scouts and nerdy number

crunch-ers to better evaluate playcrunch-ers and

prospects (the fascinating subject of

Moneyball, both the book and the

movie), as well as for agents, lawyers,

marketers, publicists and

broadcast-ers—not to mention the

simultane-ous explosion in infrastructure, such

as ever better and more sophisticated

equipment, player-monitoring

de-vices, playing fields and stadiums

Many people still regard football

as a game of lumbering derthals The NFL and serious college football are both tough and cere-bral “Few of us have the intelligence

semi-Nean-to play football on the professional level,” Tamny notes “Players

have to memorize a playbook the size of the Yellow Pages.” Great football players—or those great at any sport—are intense students of the game Athleticism isn’t enough

In fact, given the hard work and the immense physical and cere-bral discipline necessary to master high-level college football, the sport, says the author, should be a major

Tamny entertainingly discusses the creation of numerous new kinds of jobs, such as coaches for teams of video game players (one competition can attract tens of thousands of fans) and dog walk-ers, as well as the rising remu-neration (often in six figures) and sophistication of traditional, once seemingly simple tasks such as cad-dying (pro golf caddies are trusted and crucial advisors to players).With affluence, people’s tastes for finer things expands Costco is today the biggest importer of French wine in the world

Tamny closes his enjoyable work with this thought: “In an economy of individuals, we’re all better off when each person gets to pursue what most amplifies his unique skills and intel-ligence.”

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s summer stop at an

85C bakery cafe in Los Angeles let a bitter atertaste

on both sides of the Straits

When word of Tsai’s visit reached China, panied by photos of the president with drink in hand, netizens on the mainland began calling for a boycott of the chain in

accom-their country because they saw the event as an endorsement of

Tai-wan’s independence he chain’s parent company, Gourmet Master,

saw its Taipei-listed shares slump nearly 14% in the weeks

follow-ing, wiping out $224 million of its market value

Gourmet Master appeared on the 2012 iteration of Forbes Asia’s

Best Under A Billion companies list

he day ater the presidential visit, the bakery-cafe chain

an-nounced its support for the “1992 Consensus,” an agreement

be-tween China and Taiwan to acknowledge that there is only “one

China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what that

means China considers self-ruled Taiwan a part of its territory that

will eventually be reuniied with the mainland Tsai has not

public-ly endorsed the consensus since taking oice in 2016, which has

re-sulted in mainland diplomats cutting of communication with their

Taiwanese counterparts

“It is a kind of reality that Taiwan companies have to face so

far,” says Wu Chung-li, a political science research fellow at

Aca-demia Sinica “On one hand, they have to face the domestic issue,

but on the other hand they have to also consider the great market

of China, so that is why it’s no wonder the 85C cofee shop the next

day declared their support for the 92 Consensus.”

But 85C’s attempt to appease its customers in China with the statement of support for the 1992 Consensus generated resentment

in Taiwan, with one legislator suggesting that the cafe rebrand self as 92C

it-A spokeswoman for 85C declined to elaborate further on the controversy or discuss any decline in sales at the chain’s China stores

he majority of 85C’s business comes from its 600 bakery cafes

in China; it operates an additional 430 outlets in its homeland of Taiwan he chain’s name stands for 85 degrees Celsius, which is

GROUNDS FOR DEBATE

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 15

thought to be the optimal temperature for brewing cofee, according

to Wu Cheng Hsueh, the company’s founder and chairman

Cus-tomers associate the brand with its budget cofees, sea-salt-flavored

cofee foam and birthday cakes Retired people oten gather at its

outlets to drink, read newspapers and chat

Gourmet Master’s earnings jumped by almost 23% last year

to $70.3 million he company’s revenue came in at $757 million

in the same period, with about two thirds of sales coming from

China he company had allocated $59 million in the same

peri-od to accelerate the expansion of it 85C stores in China as well as the U.S

he company’s reluctance to comment further shows it wants

to move on from the flap and get its business back to normal, says Liang Kuo-yuan, president of the Taipei-based think tank Polaris Research Institute “If China doesn’t give it any more pressure, then

it can get over this diiculty,” Liang says But, he advises, Chinese oicials may be mulling more “limits on the freedom” of Taiwanese investors in its territory F

Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to cafe and bakery 85C in Los Angeles created a cafeine jag for parent company Gourmet Master

Where E-cash Is King

China has experienced a intech explosion in recent

years, with top companies dominating the industry

It’s not an accident that Alibaba spinof Ant Financial and Tencent rule digital payments, or that Yirendai and Lufax are major players in the online lending sector All of these companies have garnered large amounts of in-

vestment, expanded into areas with high levels of demand and have

successfully diversiied out of their core business

Ant Financial is not yet publicly listed, but it received Series C

funding of $14 billion in June While Tencent’s WeChat Pay is not

part of a subsidiary, it continues to reap funding from Tencent

inves-tors Tencent (see p 45) is a juggernaut whose Hong Kong Stock

Exchange shares, even ater a recent dip, have risen 100-fold since

its IPO in 2004 Its market cap reached a high of $577 billion in

January Creditease’s peer-to-peer lending company Yirendai is also

listed, on Nasdaq with a market cap of $1.2 billion Ping

An-ailiat-ed Lufax has reportAn-ailiat-edly postponAn-ailiat-ed a possible listing in Hong Kong

but was said to be targeting another funding injection of $2 billion

All of these companies have plenty of capital, even as funding for

smaller startups, by some accounts, has already slowed his means

that, despite China’s slowing economy, these irms have the means

to continue growing

It’s not just about money, however hese irms have hit the

mark when it comes to meeting pent-up demand for their intech

services For Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, that

demand for digital payments has proved to be massive, as Chinese

consumers require faster and safer transactions Both

applica-tions have other beneicial features With Alipay, users

can obtain consumer or seller loans, credit that is oten

unavailable via banks Alipay can be used for oline or

online purchases, particularly on Alibaba’s e-commerce

websites WeChat Pay ofers WeChat users the ability

to send money to one another even if they don’t have a

bank account WeChat Pay can also be used oline and

online, such as to purchase goods pushed by WeChat

Chinese regulators, increasingly concerned about

potential risks to the inancial system, imposed a series

of curbs that will crimp the companies’ revenue streams

and curtail their rapid pace of expansion For example,

both Alipay and WeChat Pay are now required to process

payments through a central clearing account, and the

payments they receive have to be deposited at

commer-cial banks in accounts that pay no interest Previously,

they had generated interest income from the payments

they were holding in their own escrow accounts

Yirendai and Lufax have also been successful in illing a demand gap Again, many consumers and small businesses have a hard time obtaining loans from China’s formal inancial sector—namely, from banks hey are oten forced to borrow on the curb market at very high interest rates With the advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending companies, smaller borrowers with little to no collateral have found themselves able to borrow for the irst time he P2P lending sector

is going through a regulatory shakedown, as riskier companies with Ponzi-like business models are shut down he larger irms, like Yirendai and Lufax, have shown their compliance with the new regulations, which require opening a custodial account for funds and company registration he crackdown is likely to drive of some lenders associated with the smaller irms, but it would be impossible

to eliminate the high demand for funds among small borrowers hese borrowers likely will turn to the likes of Yirendai and Lufax.Finally, all of these irms have diversiied out of their core busi-nesses into areas that successfully complement and add value to their mainstream activities Ant Financial has Alipay and also ofers

a wealth-management product called Yu’e Bao, which has become the world’s largest money market fund, drawing customers seek-ing better returns than what savings accounts typically ofer he combination of Alipay and Yu’e Bao has helped Ant Financial attract customers to its inancial services that help them both spend and save Tencent has added digital content and membership subscrip-tions sold through WeChat Yirendai and Lufax both ofer wealth-management products in addition to loans, giving Chinese investors more alternatives for where they can park their money

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 17

FORBES ASIA

PULSION

Magic Mirror

A Chinese virtual fitting room startup boosts retailers’ revenues with big data.

Shang-hai, shoppers are lining up

to create their own sonal avatars to try on new clothes he store, named Moda Polso (Italian for “fashion pulse”),

per-gives customers the chance to see

them-selves wearing diferent garments without

the hassle of actually changing clothes,

al-lowing them to make their choices more

quickly and easily

Moda Polso opened in May as a pilot

project of Shanghai’s “new retail”

appar-el company, Pulsion New retail, a term

coined by Alibaba’s Jack Ma, refers to the

integration of online and oline

resourc-es in order to revolutionize the retail

ex-perience “[Virtual itting rooms] connect

consumers, products and stores, providing

a novel and convenient shopping

experi-ence,” says Zhang Tianbing, a retail analyst

at Deloitte China

Revolutionary or not, the Moda Polso

outlet certainly doesn’t look like a typical

apparel store A third of its space is

dedi-cated to displaying merchandise and ten

touchscreens, including one called the

“magic mirror” because of its large size

he rest of the area is reserved for

chang-ing rooms and a storage room

accommo-dating 3,000 pieces of roughly 1,000

de-signs “A typical store is able to at least

quadruple its portfolio using Pulsion’s

sys-tem,” says Tu Zhenghui, the company’s

32-year-old chief executive It can also be

used to save space, reducing rental

expens-es, a major cost for oline stores

Working with the world’s largest

data-base of Asian women’s body types (6

mil-lion), the sotware uses just 20 parameters

to generate more accurate 3-D models that

showcase how clothing drapes on a

per-son’s body As impressive as that sounds,

Pulsion’s new store, which carries a dozen

Chinese brands, is likely to be its only one

“An experimental pilot,”

as Tu calls it, the store was opened to test and optimize Pulsion’s system he com-pany’s virtual itting rooms are an extension of its gar-ment store management system, which promises to predict consumer demand and allow retailers to in-crease sales while reducing inventory costs

Pulsion’s system does this by analyzing shoppers’

buying patterns, enabling retailers to renew their product lineup in a more timely fashion—idle items typically account for roughly half of an oline store’s portfolio

he system can also predict what is

like-ly to sell in the future, allowing brands to make adjustments to reduce excess inven-tory “Such prepurchase behavioral data

is almost impossible for traditional and-mortar stores to collect,” Tu says

brick-According to Pulsion’s research on 40 China-listed apparel irms, their total in-ventory value of $4.5 billion is seven times greater than their combined annual earn-ings “he apparel sector could be as lu-crative as real estate if you bet on the right portfolio,” says Tu

Once consumers create a proile linked

to their cellphone number or WeChat count, Pulsion’s system can keep in touch with them ater they’ve let the store to rec-ommend new arrivals When they revis-

ac-it the store and log onto one of the

devic-es, they’ll see customized product displays based on their behavioral data

Pulsion’s revenue is derived from ing sales commissions in the low single digits It expects to generate $550,000 in monthly revenue by the end of this year and $20 million in 2019

keep-Pulsion was initially set up by Huang

Zhongsheng in 2013 under the name maiyi, or “easy-buy clothes.” Huang saw

Hao-an opportunity in virtual itting rooms

“he sector was gaining popularity at the time, but no one was able to provide [good enough] technology with low cost,” the 33-year-old founder and chairman recalls

he company spent over three years and more than $10 million investing in re-search before launching its irst sotware in

2016 he same year, Pulsion began viding sotware services to Alibaba’s Tmall online stores for Chinese brands, such as Ochirly, a leading women’s garment label, but the partnership to provide its virtual try-on service to Tmall lasted only a year

pro-“While our sotware helped consumers discover what it them better, it resulted in

a drop in those stores’ sales, as most people don’t look as good as models,” says Tu Renaming itself ater ending the vir-tual try-on partnership, Pulsion changed course to target oline businesses And Huang sought help from Tu, his old college friend and former partner in a food deliv-ery startup Tu admits that the virtual it-ting room segment, although growing fast,

is unlikely to last long on its own Many fline stores are using the technology as a gimmick to attract customers, he says

of-A itting result? F

Pulsion’s fitting library aims to change the retail experience

BY JANE HO

Seats,

Then Services

Myriad charts and igures of the latest real

estate transactions in Chinese tropolises flash across the laptop of Liu Chengcheng as he talks, but one magazine article sits conspicuously on his immacu-late desk, marked up with bold red lines It tells the story of

me-the co-working giant WeWork “We pay a lot of attention

to data,” Liu said in his high-rise oice in central Beijing

“Especially the data of our competitors.”

Liu, 30, is the founder of Chinese co-working startup Kr

Space He’s going all out to defend his home market from

WeWork, which is already in 26 countries and flush with

cash, having just raised $1 billion more from investors he

New York company, valued last year at $20 billion, has built

a global brand with its industrial-chic décor, large common

areas, inspirational signs and perks like free beer and yoga

sessions But Liu is conident that Kr Space will come out on

top in China because his team knows the local market better

“here are so many China-speciic requirements,” Liu says “I

don’t think WeWork really understood all of these in its early days here, which was why they were expanding slowly.”

Essentially, Kr Space operates along the same lines as WeWork It leases oice space from developers and renovates them before subleasing to freelancers and companies for 1,000 yuan ($147) to 6,000 yuan per seat a month, depending

on the location he local knowledge he is leveraging against WeWork can include everything from complying with build-ing and safety regulations and inding the best contractors to creating oice designs better suited to China’s work culture

Kr Space says the free beer and Ping-Pong tables ofered

by its rival don’t it with the heavy workloads and the ing “996” schedule (9 a.m to 9 p.m., six days a week) that’s become pervasive among Chinese companies It has instead opted to provide no-charge add-ons like inancial and legal consulting services

gruel-Kr Space oicially launched in Beijing in 2016 as a spinof

of the now Alibaba-backed technology news site 36 Kr, which Liu founded in 2011 and still chairs today His latest

venture manages 270,000 square meters of oice space in 11 cities across the country,

as of June, while serving 40,000 members (the company calls them “users”), accord-ing to a spokesman

Investors are also moving in Kr Space will soon close another funding round that should raise $200 million at a valua-tion north of $1 billion, according to three

COMMUNAL OFFICES

Like WeWork, its big Chinese rivals don’t make a profit from work-share space

Kr Space founder Liu Chengcheng says growth has to come first.

N/A: NOT AVAILABLE SOURCE: COMPANIES.

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 19

people with knowledge of the matter Early talks of an IPO in

the U.S have also been taking place A Kr Space spokesman

declined to comment on the funding but says there are no

IPO plans yet (Liu won’t say what stake he is retaining.)

Also very much in the hunt is China’s Ucommune, led by

Mao Daqing, a former executive of real estate giant Vanke

It was valued at $1.6 billion ater merging with local rival

Wujie Space in March

he domestic challenges are also better at controlling

costs, according to Jeacy Yan, a partner at investment irm

IDG Capital “Oice sharing is a very localized business

where you have to focus closely on operations,” Yan says

“Local companies have a much bigger chance of becoming

the winner.”

Ken Xu, a partner at investment irm Gobi Partners and

an investor in Kr, points to Liu himself as one of the key

fac-tors in the company’s growth His experience running 36 Kr

has enabled him to build a network among local

entrepre-neurs and better understand their needs

WeWork, meanwhile, still leads in brand awareness, and

domestic irms are working to catch up, according to IDG’s

Yan he company recently clinched a separate $500 million

funding for its China-focused subsidiary from investors

that included Singapore’s Temasek WeWork acquired

Chinese rival Naked Hub for $400 million in April, and it

plans to expand to 40 locations and attract 40,000 members

by the end of the year

Talks between Adam Neumann, WeWork’s billionaire cofounder, and Liu in Beijing fell apart because they couldn’t agree on who would have control of the combined entity, according to one knowledgeable party A WeWork spokes-woman declined to say whether Neumann had met with Liu

he Chinese market, according to Beijing consultancy iResearch, reached 5.5 billion yuan and should nearly double

by 2019 It beneits from government policies that age startup businesses to spur domestic innovation

encour-Like WeWork, which last year reported a loss of $933 lion on revenues of $886 million, the unicorns Kr Space and Ucommune are well short of proitability hey plan ulti-mately to monetize advertising and premium services, which can be more lucrative than leasing seats, says iResearch analyst Yu Kexin

mil-For his part, Liu doesn’t see making money as a priority because Kr Space is currently focused on expansion And

he is already looking beyond mainland China: In May, Kr Space entered Hong Kong, leasing seven floors at the One Hennessy building in Wan Chai It’s also expanding into Bangkok, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo, with the goal of catch-ing up with WeWork in terms of total oice space managed

by 2021

“WeWork is just entering Asia, so we are at the same page here,” he says “his is a market we must take.”

On Asia: “This is a market

we must take,” says founder

Liu Chengcheng.

F

Manny Pacquiao, the only eight-division world

champion in the history of boxing has added

a new designation to his major world titles:

ambassador for luxury watch boutique HANDA

Watch World He joins fellow philanthropist

Haruhisa Handa, president of Japanese trading

company Misuzu and owner of the boutique, in

envisaging a world without poverty.

Childhood Memories

There are countless stories about Manny

Pac-quiao Inside the ring, the 39-year-old Filipino

boxer defeats his opponent like a ferocious

carnivore going after its prey But outside

the ropes, his gentle smile is always turned

toward the poor and needy, reminding fans

of the late American boxer and humanitarian

Mohammed Ali

Pacquiao, whose real name is Emanuel

Dapidran Pacquiao, was born in the

Philip-pines in 1978 He started to box

profession-Thai champion Chatchai Sasakul to earn the world flyweight title He has since gone on

to win multiple major world championships

In addition to his boxing career, he has also made a name for himself as a basketball player and coach, and in 2016 won a six-year term in the Philippine senate

World Class Champion

In April, Pacquiao attended the grand ing of HANDA Watch’s Tsukamidori store

open-in Osaka He also had another objective for his visit: to meet face to face with Haruhisa Handa, the president of Misuzu, which runs the boutique

Handa, a successful businessman whose portfolio includes a college preparatory school, is well known for his philanthropic work, such as building more than 130 schools

in China for disadvantaged children Handa’s projects have won enthusiastic support from

the world, and past events hosted by Handa’s company have attracted big names, includ-ing former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan

For Pacquiao, who grew up in extreme poverty, his encounter with Handa had a very special meaning

“We discovered we both share the same enthusiasm to help the poor It is truly an honor to be able to envision a plan together for such an endeavor,” he said

determi-The Filipino boxing legend gives fans a good reason to keep coming back to the ring.

Manny Pacquiao (left) and Haruhisa Handa (right)

HANDA WATCH WORLD

AMBASSADOR MANNY PACQUIAO

success provides moral support for all those

facing poverty.”

A True Champion

In the world of boxing, merely becoming a

world title holder does not instantly translate

to international fame as it does with other

sports Only those who win the big matches

are recognized as true champions

Pacquiao has triumphed against the

sport’s superstars, such as British professional

boxer Ricky Hatton and Puerto Rico’s Miguel

Cotto He started his career in the

light-fly-weight division, which has a maximum limit

of 112 pounds, and eventually accomplished

the feat of winning major world titles across

six weight divisions, putting on more than 20

kilograms over the years Handa shared one

of the many unforgettable stories that

illus-trates Pacquiao’s physical prowess

“Although it was a non-title battle, the

match with Oscar De La Hoya in 2008 was

just awesome It gave me goose bumps De

La Hoya was much bigger both in height and

weight, but Pacquiao did not change his style

and was aggressive from the start without

any hesitation Eventually in the eighth round,

he knocked out De La Hoya with a TKO

[tech-nical knockout] I was simply amazed with

Pacquiao, who constantly aims high no

mat-ter what,” Handa said

Setting an Example

Pacquiao’s matches are always

extraordi-nary, but the fight money is also legendary

When he fought against five-division world

champion Floyd Mayweather Jr in Las Vegas

in 2015, the match was billed as the biggest

fight of the century, and the combined prize

money exceeded US$365 million In only 36

minutes of fighting, they grossed more than

the annual income of high-earning athletes

such as tennis player Roger Federer and

foot-baller Lionel Messi He uses his fight money

to continue giving to children in the world

suffering from poverty

“We have launched several projects so far,

but there are still numerous things we must

do,” Pacquiao said “Now that I have become

the ambassador, I want to promote this watch

as a means to contribute to society.”

Pacquiao’s feelings are well understood by

Handa, who already has several ideas in mind,

including a project to build “Manny Pacquiao

Hospitals” in poor and remote areas, and

Handa is prepared to extend his support

Following his visit to Japan, Pacquiao had

an opportunity to regain glory once again,

in a match that took place in Kuala Lumpur

on July 15 Prior to the fight, Pacquiao mented “it is quite significant that such a big event is being held in Asia I am sure it will

com-be an exciting match In the coming match,

I want to do my best for the people of Asia.”

From the start, Pacquiao dominated his opponent, World Boxing Association welter-weight champion Lucas Matthysse He sent his opponent to the canvas three times in total, with a seventh-round TKO to reclaim his title as world champion The fight was

an overwhelming victory reminiscent of his

golden days of boxing, and had the 16,000 fans on their feet

Handa muses, “Pacquiao will keep coming back to the ring, representing the feelings of Asians, and wishing for peace in Asia And this is precisely why I want all of us to closely watch his matches, one by one.”

Grand opening celebrations at HANDA Watch World · Shinsaibashi-Tsukamidori store (1-12-10 Higashi Shinsaibashi, Chuo-ku, Osaka-shi, Osaka prefecture, 06-6245-8685

Opening hours are 10:30-20:00, closed on Wednesdays)

Contact information:

Misuzu Corporation81-3-3247-5585

www.misuzu.com

On a quiet street in

Mon-tecito, California, a urb of Santa Barba-

sub-ra, Procore CEO Craig

“Tooey” Courte manche

is considering how best to break into

his own house It was amid the

frustra-tion of renovating this

Spanish-mod-ern-style three-bedroom 18 years ago

that he built a simple app to track

com-ings and gocom-ings of workers on-site Now

he’s using the app to redo the house

again, this time to beit the CEO of one

of tech’s fastest-growing companies he

app, called Procore, is the most

pop-ular piece of sotware in the $1

tril-lion U.S construction industry, used on

hundreds of thousands of projects from

sports stadiums to high-rises Sales are

approaching $200 million, good for ith

place on the 2018 Forbes Cloud 100

list (forbes.com/cloud/100) But on this

dusty July day, none of that matters as

Courtemanche, 51, squeezes between

palm trees and then a gap in his fence

We’re dropping by unexpectedly so

Courtemanche can show me the front

steps, which will look like they’re

float-ing in water, and the bay doors to the

new ininity pool, which he’s coded to

open by voice Downstairs is the yoga

studio for his wife, an instructor, and

the new guest room, where his

20-year-old son, a full-time Procore

partner-ships manager, can crash Back at work

in nearby Carpinteria, Courtemanche

can watch the house come together on

Procore, tracking worker schedules and

ielding questions from his contractor and subcontractors, comparing prog-ress photos to the drawings and ind-ing out how far over budget he’s going

Employees are used to catching manche in meetings or at lunch check-ing progress on his home via the app

Courte-“Who else gets bug reporting from their CEO?” he says

Other CEOs carry on courtside at NBA games; Courtemanche is excited

to have lunch with construction ties like Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe But when it comes to ambition, Procore and its CEO it right in with the brashest highfliers in tech “We believe we’re just

celebri-in the early days,” Courtemanche says

“I want Procore to be the single source

of truth for everything in construction worldwide.”

AT ORIENTATION ATProcore’s headquarters, a record batch of 59 new employees and summer interns glad-

ly take a break from a log-in tials lecture to meet their CEO Courte-manche, oozing beach-dad charm, has dropped in to tell a few jokes and take questions Procore’s founding legend comes up Does he still own the house that inspired all of this? “I still have my Land Rover from 1998, the same house, even the same family,” Courtemanche quips “hat house is Procore.”

creden-In 2002, when he founded Procore, Courtemanche was a moderately suc-cessful tech executive in Silicon Val-ley, making custom interfaces for online

HR sotware On the road

constant-ly, Courtemanche had received an matum from his wife four years earlier: She and their son were moving south to Santa Barbara, and he was welcome to join She’d picked a home, too—one that would need a lot of work At irst flying down on weekends, Courte manche found progress on the house moving at

ulti-a glulti-aciulti-al pulti-ace So he did whulti-at he knew best and coded his own program to keep track

By 2004 Courtemanche had signed

up contractors for Hollywood stars like Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller and Barbra Streisand to monitor their home ren-ovations with Procore Courtemanche spoke the language of construction flu-ently Growing up in the aluent La Jolla area of San Diego, Courtemanche was an indiferent student, more in-terested in girls than schoolwork But construction was another story Ater school he’d sweep out the floors of a cabinet shop, and by 17 he’d become a journeyman carpenter ater completing

a six-month apprenticeship

A disastrous year at the University

of Arizona, where he flunked out with

a 0.3 GPA, led to a security guard job and then community college, where Courtemanche got the grades to be ac-cepted into a premed program in San Francisco Once north, he got caught

up in the construction boom of the early 1990s, “swinging a hammer” for two years Feeling burned out, he took

up a family friend’s ofer to learn the ETHAN

Tooey Courtemanche has crafted one of tech’s biggest secrets in Procore,

a multibillion-dollar app bringing construction projects onto the cloud.

BY ALEX KONRAD

Procore CEO Tooey Courtemanche:

“We are making the lives of construction people better.”

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 23

telephony sotware business, then taught

himself HTML By 1993 he was a

sot-ware engineer; by 1996 he’d founded a

tech consultancy

When Courte manche built the

pro-totype for Procore ive years later, he was

shocked Construction made up

near-ly 10% of America’s economy, but even

as late as 2002 its workers barely used the

internet “Holy crap, I’ve been given a

time machine,” he thought

For a fledgling sotware business,

Santa Barbara was no San Francisco But

what it did have was plenty of well-heeled

refugees from the Bay Area and Los

An-geles looking for a quieter life One

inves-tor, Steve Zahm, who had founded and

then sold the e-learning company

Dig-italhink for $120 million, joined

Pro-core as president in 2004 (a role he still

holds today) A bigger ish, DoubleClick

cofounder Kevin O’Connor, wrote

Pro-core’s irst institutional check, leading

a $950,000 seed round and joining the

startup’s board

Procore grew, but more

modest-ly than hoped here’s a saying in

invest-ing: If you’re early, you’re just as good as

wrong—and Procore was very early In

2006, four years ater Procore was

found-ed, the iPhone was still one year into the

future and Wi-Fi was virtually

nonex-istent Procore ran on laptops and

re-quired internet connections, still rare on

job sites Courtemanche and Zahm were

known to fly across the country to rig up

homemade hot spots for clients at a loss

When Courte manche brought the app

to Sand Hill Road to meet Silicon Valley

venture capitalists, he was laughed out of

town At Sequoia Capital, a low-level

ana-lyst told him that focusing on one

indus-try vertical was a sucker’s play “Make it a

social network and I’ll write you a check

right now,” Courtemanche remembers

him saying

When the inancial crisis hit in 2008,

home building froze in its tracks

Courte-manche mortgaged his house and, along with Zahm, cut his salary to zero All but ive employees were laid of Investors ex-pected to hear that the startup was shut-ting down

But Courtemanche was stubborn He was convinced that construction would need IT eventually When it did, Procore would be ready Slowly, trends shited in Procore’s favor Construction companies began revisiting their work flows; young-

er workers, who expected sotware to be part of their job, entered the industry

In 2010 Apple launched the iPad, ing a sturdier device to worksites, which increasingly had access to Wi-Fi A de-cade into operations, in 2012, Procore was still small, with sales of just $5 mil-

bring-lion, but growth started to hockey stick

Silicon Valley inally took notice: In 2014 Bessemer Ventures led a $15 million in-vestment round, then poured in another

$30 million alongside Iconiq Capital ten months later

Procore’s customers were starting to get much bigger Managers at Wieland,

a 61-year-old Michigan contracting irm that operates $325 million of projects a year, have used Procore since late 2015

At Wieland’s multimillion-dollar paper mill project in Wapakoneta, Ohio, team leaders and managers are equipped with iPad Pros so they can check drawings and updates on Procore at all times Be-cause Procore doesn’t charge by head count but by subscription, subcontrac-tors and partners working with custom-ers like Wieland end up using Procore for free and then oten spread it to their other projects “We have a motto, and it’s simple: 100% Procore,” says Rob Krueger, Wieland’s CEO

As Procore has added features to cover things like safety inspections and inanc-ing, it’s been able to crack some of the in-dustry’s biggest players, like Mortenson,

a $4 billion-in-sales construction giant based in Minnesota, which pays an esti-

mated seven igures a year to keep 2,000 employees on the app Landing these big-ger customers has allowed Procore to raise a war chest of $180 million in fund-ing since 2015, reaching a valuation of about $1 billion in late 2016

Construction tech is now red-hot, and Procore has attracted challengers both big and small Sotware giants Oracle and Trimble each made $1.2 billion acquisi-tions in the space in the past six months, and VCs who missed out on Procore are now backing newer startups And at least one rival quietly bid several billion dollars for Procore in the past and was rebufed, sources say Procore declined to comment

on the overture

Still, thanks to its years of survival, Procore’s product looks to have a head start “I don’t think there are many com-panies challenging Procore that can hold

a candle to their size and strategy,” says Derrick Woods, an analyst at Cowen

In a little clifside clearing overlooking the Paciic on Procore’s campus, the man-agement team, sweating in the July heat, forms a half-circle around Courtemanche for their morning stand-up meeting Now

at 1,200 employees, Procore instituted the meetings companywide several years ago

as a salve for the chaos of its rapid growth Later that day Procore will announce a partnership with Sage, an accounting sot-ware maker and erstwhile rival Elsewhere, cross-functional teams are working on ad-ditional versions of Procore’s app for prop-erty owners, subcontractors and enter-prise-size customers

hose releases could be the last

touch-es Procore needs before iling to go lic ahead of an IPO, which insiders say

pub-is likely to come in early 2019 In nal meetings and with customers, Pro-core is already acting like a public-com-pany-to-be, battening down the hatches for Wall Street to get its irst close look at the numbers of an ugly duckling startup turned cloud leader

inter-Courtemanche says that ater all these years, he’s not planning to hang up his hammer once he rings the market bell As with his house, the vision for Procore may grow grander, but it’ll be the same founda-tion “I’m a dog on a bone,” Procore’s CEO says “I won’t be able to walk away.”

JOB-SITE TECH

F

“WHO ELSE GETS BUG REPORTING

FROM THEIR CEO?”

America’s most innovative—and feared—business leader is coming of a

three-year run that has made him the richest person of all time Now he tells

Forbes he’s only begun to grow Corporate America, you’ve been warned.

BY RANDALL LANE

Unlike America’s other tech

giants, Amazon doesn’t have

a traditional campus he 45,000 or so employees and executives in Seattle, out of 575,000 worldwide, fan across numerous

high-rises downtown and in the South Lake

Union neighborhood Amazon’s

“head-quarters” defaults to where Jef Bezos, the

company’s founder and CEO, happens to

be, currently Day 1 Tower Its name comes

from a perpetual Bezos maxim: that,

rel-atively, we’re still at “day one” of the

inter-net—and, by extension, that Amazon is just

getting started

hat’s getting harder to say with a straight

face, with sales, proits and the stock price all

soaring, the latter up 270% over three years

and 103% in the past 12 months Amazon

is closing in on Apple to become the world’s

most valuable company, and Bezos, whose

personal net worth approaches $160 billion,

has in the process become the planet’s

rich-est person by far

Nevertheless, Bezos talks about

Ama-zon like it’s a giddy startup that just closed

its Series A “For all practical purposes, the

market size is unconstrained,” says Bezos,

his rolled-up sleeves showing of

Popeye-like forearms, the product of midlife weight

training that has produced buzzed-about

re-sults for the 54-year-old His growth

ratio-nale comes from a “super-lucky”

conflu-ence: he retail market, Amazon’s original quarry, is “many trillions,” as is, he says, the cloud market that Amazon Web Ser vices (AWS) pioneered “here are diferent busi-nesses where the market is limited,” adds the man whose company should hit $210 billion

in revenue this year “But we just don’t have that issue.”

If Jef Bezos is already the world’s most feared businessperson, the prospect of him

“unconstrained” should sober every rate leader Yes, he’s ruthless and a master of the long game, but Bezos’ greatest strength, borne out over the past few years, has been his ability to shape-shit Amazon into adja-cent businesses—some of which were adja-cent only in retrospect—on a massive scale

corpo-“What Jef Bezos has done and is likely to

do is perhaps the most remarkable ment I’ve seen,” Warren Bufett told me last year, ater I asked him, open-ended, to name the most impressive business mind in his almost eight decades of market-watching

achieve-“Because he’s taken two very major tries, and simultaneously, and sort of under the nose of competitors, he’s become in ef-fect the leader and is redeining them and succeeding at really big businesses.”

indus-hough Bezos and Bufett were referring

to retail and the cloud, Bezos is actually constrained in far more ways First, thanks

un-to AWS, the company famous for ing growth over proitability is inally spit-

emphasiz-ting out billions—and Bezos has the market credibility to reinvest it in pretty much any way he wants Second, the scale that Ama-zon needs for growth practically demands aggressiveness And, inally, by dominat-ing retail and digital business services, both

of which touch almost every other try, he’s now positioned to move adjacently into just about any business where he inds added value He’s playing in the multibillions

indus-in at least four markets—healthcare, tainment, consumer electronics and adver-tising—that constitute many of the compa-nies not already terriied of Amazon It’s no coincidence that each of those four either hits or approaches the “trillions” potential Bezos alluded to

enter-While his pioneering peers of the irst dot-com era embraced and popularized the

“open kimono,” Bezos has always viewed stealthiness as an asset, masking new initia-tives inside larger expenditures and feign-ing disinterest in burgeoning favorites As Bezos’ public proile has expanded, public

ut ter ances and interviews (despite his ership of the Washington Post) have become increasingly rare Bezos refuses to discuss Donald Trump, who has taken to beating up

own-on him and the Post own-on Twitter, but he

clear-ly understands he has a target on his back When asked, as the head of an ascendant ad-vertising company, whether he took any les-sons from Facebook’s travails last year, his

TK

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 27

PURE DIAMOND FARM:

THE FUTURE OF LAB-GROWN DIAMONDS ENHANCED

WITH BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY IS HERE

AND IT’S VERY BRIGHT INDEED.

Please describe the state of the diamond industry

and its growth potential How do lab-grown

diamonds fit into the picture?

Ishida: Japan is the world’s third-largest diamond market,

at around 680 billion yen (US$6.1 billion) The global market,

valued at around 8.8 trillion yen (US$79 billion), with the U.S

accounting for nearly half It’s been relatively stable these

past few years and is expec ted to continue along these

lines However, there are a lot of people who would like to

purchase diamonds that haven’t yet, and we want to tap into

that sector, for example by making diamonds more accessible

and increasing opportunities to buy engagement or special

occasion rings.

Abe: Recently, people have become aware of the adverse

effects of diamond mining around the world, such as problems

with the blood-diamond trade, environmental destruction

and child labor There is a new market of consumers who

want diamonds but don’t want to support harmful practices

Lab-grown diamonds possess the same beauty of natural

diamonds, but because their provenance—when and where

they were produced—can be guaranteed, they are also able to offer buyers peace of mind about the ethics of their purchase

How did the Pure Diamond Farm project begin?

Abe: I first heard of lab-grown diamonds from Mr Ishida, who knew of their growing popularity in America and approached

me about expanding into Asia By coincidence, I discovered that there was a maker of cultivated diamonds in Japan and wanted

to introduce Mr Ishida.

Ishida: Yes, I had originally consulted Mr Abe about importing lab-grown diamonds from the U.S into Japan but hadn’t consid- ered domestically produced gems at all I figured that while the technology may exist here, the level of quality probably didn’t compare to those produced in the U.S However, I was surprised when they showed me the Japanese diamonds because they were incredibly beautiful I knew that we would have no prob- lem introducing stones of this quality on the international mar- ket Throughout history, diamonds have always been imported into this country, so I was excited by the prospect of exporting Japanese-made diamonds overseas.

Lab-grown, or cultivated, diamonds with the same chemical structure of natural diamonds are gaining popularity in markets such as the U.S Now Japanese company Pure Diamond Farm is building on

existing technology and utilizing blockchain technology to create gems unlike any the world has ever seen

Shigy Ishida, president of Pure Diamond Co., Ltd., and Hideyuki Abe, co-founder of Pure Diamond Lab, Ltd.,

spoke about their plans to bring diamonds made in Japan to the international market.

Unlike synthetic gems such as cubic zirconia, lab-grown diamonds are made of pure carbon, with a chemical structure identical

to naturally occurring diamonds The production process simulates the geological conditions that lead to the formation of diamonds deep below the earth’s surface, resulting in brilliant stones completely free of impurities “You can think of it as

How will lab-grown diamonds affect the natural

diamond market?

Is hida: Ninety-eight percent of natural diamonds contain

impurities, while lab-grown diamonds are composed entirely

of pure carbon There are a lot of inferior-quality diamonds

being sold cheaply, so one effect might be that these stones

will disappear from the market, as jewelry made with lab-grown

diamonds offers a better, reasonably priced alternative

Lab-grown diamonds may pose a threat to traders dealing with

natural diamonds, but natural diamonds will still retain their value

as natural products We’ll have to create different standards of

value for cultivated diamonds Actually, lab-grown diamonds may

boost the entire market As we’ve seen in the U.S., shops that

carry both lab-grown and natural varieties have seen increases

in overall sales.

Pure Diamond Farm is currently the only company

that is combining lab-grown diamond production with

blockchain technology What are the advantages of this?

Abe: With blockchain technology, we’re able to trace the entire

history of a diamond—where it was made, who handled it

previously—much like reading the story of a person’s life In this

way, the product becomes imbued with a different significance

We were inspired by an IBM project that uses blockchain to trace

natural diamonds in order to ensure that they’re conflict-free, but

we have taken this idea further by using the information to create

new value beyond the gem’s beauty as an object We can record

the individual differences of each stone, and this gives consumers

another reason to buy it For example, you might wish to purchase

a diamond that was made on your birthday, or to commemorate

a special event

What kind of new products will be possible with this cultivation technology?

What is your business plan going forward?

Ishida: The number of flat stones that can be convention- ally mined are only a few It’s not possible to produce 100 pairs of earrings with natural diamonds

gem-of this shape, but we can make them with lab-grown diamonds because we have the technology

to cut diamonds in a way that reduces carat size while maxi- mizing surface area That means that we will be able to provide more of these kinds of products

at an affordable price This is only possible with lab-grown mond technology.

dia-Abe: It’s the same with colored diamonds We’re now ing how to produce a rainbow-colored diamond—after all, Japan is known for perfecting techniques to bring new, inno- vative products to market We already have the technology

research-to produce a pink diamond, so the next step will be research-to make

a red diamond—a naturally occurring object of rarity Then,

we plan to work on a two-toned diamond The market for fancy-color diamonds is growing, and there is potential for further expansion We will also be able to collaborate with designers and make artistic pieces Really, the possibilities are endless

HIDEYUKI ABE

Born in 1976, Hideyuki Abe is the co-founder of Pure Diamond Lab, Ltd He has served as an advisor to Samsung Mpeon Asia, the Dailan Brothers Record Company and Enterprise Cruises In 2015, he became an authorized agent for Chia Tai Group, a subsidiary of the investment conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group In the same year, he was named representative director of consulting firm Siam Partners and continues to wear many hats as the representative director of Japanese companies Otobotoke and 21Lady.

of the Japanese Shoot Boxing Association in 2013.

(L-R) Hideyuki Abe, co-founder, Pure Diamond Lab, Ltd;

Shigy Ishida, president, Pure Diamond Co., Ltd.

According to the Fancy Color Diamond Research Foundation (FCRF), prices

of blue diamonds rose 5.5% in 2017, thanks to robust demand for colored diamonds in Asia Pure Diamond Lab is currently researching how to produce red, two-toned and rainbow-

colored stones.

PROFILES

Sears Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald.

h is is where the story should have ended But as the Western world’s domi-nant online retailer, Amazon was also solv-ing huge technological and logistical prob-lems, and rather than view those skills merely as accretive to the core business, Bezos saw them as businesses unto them-selves An internal need for part-time de-velopers led to Mechanical Turk, one of the world’s i rst crowdsourcing gig market-places Building a staggeringly ei cient de-livery infrastructure led to the Fuli llment

by Amazon service, and mastering how to take money for each purchase led to Ama-zon Pay Most important, as Amazon began building enormous capabilities to store its data in the cloud, Bezos i gured out that other businesses might want to store their data there as well In 2017, AWS had $17.5 billion in revenue

Even those customer-driven concepts create skills-based dividends Take the Kin-dle reader, Amazon’s i rst foray into hard-ware, back in 2007 Wilke, who came from AlliedSignal, remembers protesting to the board “I spoke up and said, ‘I don’t agree

I think we’re likely to miss our planned livery date Our yields are gonna be too low We’re gonna underproduce We’re gonna frustrate customers Hardware’s hard We’re

de-a sot wde-are compde-any.’

“Jef said, ‘Well, I’m willing to concede that all those things will happen, and I still think that the right vision for our compa-

ny is to be really good at building hardware,

so we need to get started learning.” And so they did Kindle is a romanticized product

at Amazon, both because of the hardware breakthrough and because it harks back

to the company’s roots in books It didn’t transform the company, though, and other hardware failures, like the disastrous Fire smartphone, followed But Bezos’ decision also eventually led to the Amazon Echo smart speaker, a true game-changer

“We have a lot of hardware experience today, but back then we didn’t have those skills,” says Bezos, laughing “You have to be patient It’s not going to be just time to

ment without some failure,” says Jef Wilke, the longtime Bezos lieutenant who runs Amazon’s consumer and retail operations

“h ose we sort of celebrate In fact, we want them to occur all over the place Jef doesn’t need to review those I don’t need to review those.”

But regarding the larger ideas and cals—a.k.a “one-way doors”—that change the direction of the company, Bezos prides himself on playing “chief slowdown of-

verti-i cer.” He’s lookverti-ing for three thverti-ings Fverti-irst, originality “We have to have a dif erenti-ated idea It can’t be a ‘me too’ of ering,” he says Second, scale “We’re git ed with some very large businesses we’ve built over time, and we can’t af ord to put our energies into something that if it works, it’s still going to

be small.” And, i nally, a Silicon thy ROI “Even at substantial scale, it has to have good returns on capital.”

Valley-wor-Ultimately, the ideas that hit that troika, Bezos says, emanate from one of two mod-els Either by looking backward at custom-

er needs—as in we’ve noticed people act a certain way, so let’s try to serve them with

a product Or peering forward—we know how to do something valuable, so let’s i nd customers

h e Amazon juggernaut ultimately stems from the latter Originally a niche player, Bezos could have easily focused just

on becoming the world’s digital bookstore, the way crat s belong to Etsy and shoes to Zappos (now owned by Amazon, natural-ly) But in mastering selling books, Bezos saw that he could use those tools—from inventory management to recommenda-tion engines—to move adjacently: i rst into music and DVDs, then toys and electronics, then pretty much anything that can be sold

at retail And he again leveraged that knowledge audaciously (and successfully) in opening up Ama-zon as a platform for independent sellers, who were formerly com-petitors—cementing his legacy as a transformative retailer, in the pan-theon with the likes of Sam Wal-ton, Aaron Montgomery Ward and

answer was succinct, political and

incon-ceivable “No,” says this advocate for

corpo-rate learning, pausing for a few seconds to

underscore that he wasn’t going there Ditto

questions about becoming a data company

“I’ve never really thought of Amazon in that

way,” says the man who runs as

data-driv-en a company as any, before reverting to his

stump speech When it’s suggested that it’s

at least a tool, Bezos quickly interjects: “One

of many tools.”

Nevertheless, during the morning he

spent with Forbes outlining how he

chan-nels innovation and chooses where to

ex-pand, a road map for Amazon’s future

emerged Given Amazon’s size, it moves

both vertically and horizontally, each

direc-tion portending a lot more disrupdirec-tion Even

i ve years ago, Bezos seemed content

mere-ly to try to sell everything to everybody,

be-coming the bane mostly of retailers and

wholesalers But this master innovation

art-ist now has the ultimate palette: any

indus-try he chooses

FOR THIS UNCONSTRAINED era, the

most important word at Amazon is yes

Bezos explains, correctly, the traditional

corporate hierarchy: “Let’s say a junior

ex-ecutive comes up with a new idea that they

want to try h ey have to convince their

boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s

boss and so on—any ‘no’ in that chain can

kill the whole idea.” h at’s why nimble

start-ups so easily slaughter hidebound

dino-saurs: Even if 19 venture capitalists say no,

it just takes a 20th to say yes to get a

disrup-tive idea into business

Accordingly, Bezos has structured

Am-azon around what he calls “multiple paths

to yes,” particularly regarding “two-way

doors”: decisions that are ot en

based on incremental

im-provements and can be

re-versed if they prove unwise

Hundreds of executives can

green-light an idea, which

em-ployees can shop around

inter-nally “He knows and we know

that you can’t invent or

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 31

learn a skill It might take time for the thing

to really fl ower.” In other words, if you study

the skills Amazon is learning, you’ll have a

fair idea of what it will soon be selling

And right now Bezos is learning

about healthcare It’s America’s biggest

industry—18% of GDP—and one of its

most inei cient Last year, Bezos, along

with Buf ett and JPMorgan Chase CEO

Jamie Dimon, announced that their three

companies would pool their ef orts, hiring

high-proi le CEO Atul Gawande to lead a

nonproi t initiative to deliver better care at

a lower cost for their own employees, with

the idea of creating a scalable, clonable

model It’s no small thing: h ose three

com-panies employ 1.2 million Add in their

de-pendents, and it’s like running a pilot

proj-ect for everyone in Oregon or Connproj-ecticut

Bezos is adamant about Amazon’s

in-tentions here “h is is a nonproi t initiative,

as you guys know It’s very dif erent,” he

in-terjects, before even a full question can be

asked about it Buf ett, for his part, concurs,

having explained to me a few months ago:

“We were deluged by people at er the

an-nouncement who said, ‘We want to join in.’

And we said, ‘You don’t have to join in Steal

everything we get, if we get anything.’ ” h e

“if we get anything” is key “Like Columbus

leaving, we don’t know where the hell we’re

going exactly,” Buf ett added “But we hope

there’s another continent out there and we

don’t go of a shelf at some point.”

But even if they do sail of the Earth,

Bezos wins, as Amazon burnishes its skills

accounting for around one i t h of the

do-mestic economy While any breakthroughs

developed with Buf ett and Dimon “would

still be inside that nonproi t entity,” Bezos

says, “each of the companies can pursue

their own initiatives.” Bezos has already

started In June, Amazon agreed to pay

al-most $1 billion for PillPack, a startup that

delivers prepackaged daily prescription

en-velopes It’s everything that Amazon

is good at: fuli llment, customization

and dependability And it’s another toe in the healthcare pool

Bezos is also going to school in vertising Amazon’s most recent quarter-

ad-ly performance revealed a startling ber: Amazon is on pace to exceed $8 billion

num-in advertisnum-ing revenue this

year—rough-ly double last year’s total And why not?

Google might know what you’re

interest-ed in buying, Facebook might be able to duce what you’d be inclined to buy, but Am-azon knows what you’ve actually bought or even whether you showed intent to buy

de-h at raises all sorts of issues Bezos talks exuberantly about his consumer obsession, but there are few customers who want to be targeted with more ads Bezos says the trust that Amazon has built with its customers will ensure the company doesn’t cross a line—and that customers, in turn, will give him the benei t of the doubt “It’s very valu-able, and so you would never do anything

to jeopardize it,” he says “It’s what allows you to expand the business.” If Bezos can walk that line, it’s easy to envision the Face-book-Google advertising “duopoly” gaining

a third major entrant

Seat-tle high-rises, the most interesting building

in Amazon’s neighborhood—with gies to a stunning new biosphere designed

apolo-to serve as something of a company mons—is a food store that pokes out from the bottom of Day 1 Tower Amazon’s $13 billion Whole Foods purchase last year is only the second-most-interesting grocery initiative at Amazon; the i rst is Am-azon Go, an 1,800-square-foot ex-periment in frictionless brick-and-mortar purchases that opened in January

com-Go, a food store, might be the most Am-

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

JEFF BEZOS’ NET WORTH AND RANK

‘97 ‘98 ‘99 ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07

lar vein to warehouse clubs like Costco and BJ’s Wholesale But as it grows, it’s surged into a way to shower its 100 million-plus subscribers with perks and privileges And those perks create endless new adjacen-cies and business lines Prime explains why Amazon has started to encroach on Netflix and is expected to spend $5 billion on pro-gramming this year, including the highly touted Marvelous Mrs Maisel In just three years, “Prime Day”—an annual 36 hours of special deals just for members, with partic-ipants spending billions on more than 100 million products this July—has become a shopping holiday with a mania surpassed

in the U.S only by Black Friday and Cyber

azonian thing at Amazon Bezos has

al-ways stressed frugality, and here are his

employees (and a few Seattle residents and

tourists) shopping for their lunches,

buy-ing them from Amazon and in dobuy-ing so

also providing the company with reams of

data to hone its skills More important, Go

demonstrates what’s possible when

difer-ent aspects of Amazon’s myriad operations

come together Go en com passes

knowl-edge gained from purchases at Whole

Foods; from Amazon’s increasingly

sophis-ticated algorithmic and hardware

capabil-ities, in the form of AI, camera and sensor

technologies, which combine to igure out

what’s taken of the shelf (and put back)

and who did the taking; and from azon Pay, which seamlessly handles the transaction once the company’s app regis-ters the inputs Grabbing a chocolate milk here on the way out feels like shopliting—

Am-no checkout lines, Am-no scanning, Am-no ing If healthcare and advertising represent huge expansion verticals on Amazon’s de facto vertical campus, Go brings together what’s possible horizontally when Amazon puts all the pieces together

swip-he most important aspect of it all is Prime At its core, it’s a marketing tool,

a way to encourage buying—and ate recurring subscription revenue (an es-timated $10 billion in 2017)—in a simi-

video games (Game Boys,

Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego).

NOVEMBER 2000

Amazon place: Third- party sellers start selling everything from cameras to dollhouse furni- ture on the site.

Market-JULY 16, 2002 Amazon Web Services: renting computing power, database storage and content delivery to (mostly) small businesses.

NOVEMBER 7, 2002 Apparel: clothing from more than 400 brands, including Gap, Nordstrom, Ralph Lauren and Eddie Bauer.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2003 Sporting goods: tennis rackets, electric scooters, team jerseys.

APRIL

22, 2004

Jewelry:

$10,000 gagement rings to

en-$10 charm bracelets.

FEBRUARY 2, 2005 Amazon Prime: initially just free two- day shipping for $79 a year.

NOVEMBER 2,

2005 Mechanical Turk: micropay- ments to humans performing tasks computers can’t.

SEPTEMBER 7, 2006 Amazon Video: thousands of TV shows and movies, from

Star Trek to Buffy the pire Slayer, to download

Vam-JEFF BEZOS

3,000 2,000

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 33

lines, from cloud to retail Take the wildly successful Echo, which has made Jef Wil-ke’s existential question about Amazon—

is it a hardware or a sotware company?—moot It’s an efective piece of hardware empowered by AI-driven sotware, which drives Amazon’s retail sales, leverages Amazon’s content and so on “he most interesting thing about machine learning

as opposed to a lot of other technologies

is just how horizontal it’s going to be,” Bezos says “here’s not a single category

of business or government or anything, really, that can’t improve itself.”

Corporate America, take note—either innovate or Jef Bezos will do it for you

Monday Access to Prime is how

Ama-zon gets its outside retailers to pay more for

Fulillment by Amazon

Prime also underpins Amazon’s

brick-and-mortar strategy Prime’s same-day

deliveries and pickups require more

phys-ical beachheads, which in turn help

un-derwrite expansion into all sorts of ields

Amazon could never have justiied, such

as food, the kind of perishable product

that doesn’t it into the classic Amazon

model Ater years as a bookstore

kill-er, the company now has 16 permanent

Amazon Books locations across 11 states

And Amazon recently opened a second

Go in Seattle “hey have to have

some-thing that’s special and new,” Bezos says

“And that’s what you’re seeing if you’re paying attention to our physical-stores strategy.”

Prime, in short, has become Amazon’s central nervous system, connecting every-thing in the company—and giving Am-azon a path to expand into new markets while also juicing its core retail business—

without really being it’s own thing “It can’t

be a stand-alone business because it’s pletely tied in to our consumer ofering,”

com-Bezos says

Similarly, as seen with Go, artiicial telligence will increasingly connect what previously seemed like disparate product

in-THE AGE OF AMAZON

IN THE PAST 21 YEARS, AMAZON’S STOCK HAS RISEN A STAGGERING 98,000%—AS THE COMPANY WENT FROM HUMBLE ONLINE BOOKSTORE TO SELLING EVERYTHING FROM APPLES TO VIDEOS.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Motorcycles and ATVs

JULY 22, 2009

Zappos: buys commerce shoe retailer for just under $1 billion

e-in stock.

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Amazon Studios: film and TV production

Manchester by the Sea

is its first big hit.

NOVEMBER 14, 2011 Kindle Fire:

streaming access to 100,000 movies and TV shows.

2013 Amazon Fresh:

grocery delivery service expanded to L.A and San Francisco

JUNE 23, 2015 Amazon Echo: first smart speaker; uses virtual assistant Alexa

JANUARY 2018 Amazon Go:

new kind of store, with no checkout required, opens to public in Seattle

JUNE 28, 2018

Pillpack: nounces plans

an-to buy online pharmacy; deal hasn’t closed.

NOVEMBER 19, 2007

Amazon’s Kindle

ebook reader.

F

Crypto Boss

buzz-ing about its upcombuzz-ing IPO, Chinese cryptocurrency-mining chip irm Bit-main has been thrust into the spotlight

in recent months Jihan Wu, Bitmain’s cofounder and co-CEO, has gotten most of the media cover-

age, largely because of his prominent online social presence

Meanwhile, Micree Zhan, Bitmain’s other cofounder and

co-CEO, has kept a much lower proile but owns a much

bigger stake in Bitmain than Wu does Zhan is Bitmain’s

technical mastermind and owns 36.58% of the company,

while Wu’s stake is 20.5%, according to the leaked pre-IPO

investor decks he Beijing-based company is conident that

it will achieve a $14 billion market capitalization once it

ofers shares to the public, according to its pre-IPO investor

materials hat would make Zhan’s stake worth at least $5.1

billion and Wu’s stake worth nearly $2.9 billion

Forbes isn’t so bullish Ater talking with analysts, we

esti-mate Zhan’s net worth at around $4 billion and Wu’s at close

to $2.3 billion Forbes valued Bitmain by applying

price-to-sales ratios from comparable companies including Nvidia,

AMD, Qualcomm, Mediatek and Cisco

It is important to note that there are no directly

compa-rable companies given the unique nature of Bitmain We

picked these companies because they are also fabless chip

makers, companies that design and sell chips and hardware

but outsource production to other manufacturers, according

to Daiwa Capital Markets analyst Rick Hsu’s guidance

Bit-main is not purely a semiconductor company; a portion of its

revenue is also derived from its mining pools, BTC.com and

Antpool And given the novelty and volatility of the current

cryptocurrency industry, the application of these mining

chips is uncertain, according to Mark Li, a senior technology

analyst at Sanford C Bernstein & Co Brett Simpson of Arete

Research noted that Bitmain should be viewed as an stage version of Cisco, when there was plenty of uncertainty

early-in the future of IP

Despite his role as the technical backbone behind Bitmain, little is known about Zhan, an engineer who de-veloped the custom application-speciic integrated circuit (ASIC) chips that have propelled the global growth of the largest crypto-mining chip producer Even his LinkedIn pro-ile is stark, listing only “CEO at Bitmain” and nothing about prior jobs or education

Here’s what we know so far Ater graduating from Shandong University with a degree in electrical engineering

in 2001, Zhan received a master’s in engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microelectron-ics in 2004 He went to work at Tsinghua University as a research and development engineer at the Research Institute

of Information Technology

In 2006 he began a new job as the head of research and development and manager of the integrated circuit depart-ment at Chinese company Unitend Technologies, which specializes in circuit design At Unitend, Zhan oversaw the design and development of speciic chips for digital televi-sion; the shipment volume of these chips exceeded one million during his time there He’s also published numerous papers and patents about circuit chips and helped write the national standard for universal transport interfaces, a proto-col used in digital television devices In 2010 Zhan founded DivaIP Technologies, a Beijing-based startup to develop TV set-top boxes He met Wu by chance when the startup was canvassing the streets of Beijing, and Zhan sought advice from Wu regarding funding, Quartz reports hough Wu was unable to help in that speciic regard, the two would meet up again three years later

he younger of the duo, Wu graduated from Peking

BITMAIN’S MAIN MAN

The mining billionaire no one has heard of.

BY JASMINE TENG

SEPTEMBER 2018 FORBES ASIA | 35

University in 2009 with a dual degree in economics and

psychology According to his LinkedIn proile, he worked as

an investment manager at private equity irm China Grand

Prosperity Investment from 2010 to 2013 before he

cofound-ed Bitmain A cofounder of 8BTC, a China-bascofound-ed Bitcoin

forum launched in 2011, Wu is reportedly the irst person to

translate the bitcoin white paper—the original report written

by Satoshi Nakamoto that explained the fundamentals of

bitcoin—into Mandarin He also drew attention to himself in

2016 when he tweeted a vitriolic response to someone who

criticized his support for Bitcoin Cash

In 2013, Wu approached Zhan about founding Bitmain

to-gether Wu sought Zhan’s expertise in chip design to develop

the mining chips needed for virtual currency mining Mining

bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies requires brute force that

these ASIC chips provide, in order to solve the complex math

problems that verify transactions on a blockchain he

morn-ing ater their meetmorn-ing, Zhan spent two hours pormorn-ing through

the Wikipedia page about bitcoin and promptly agreed to join

the venture, Bloomberg reports

Four years later, in 2017, Bitmain brought in $2.5 billion

in revenue, predominantly from sales of its

cryptocurrency-mining equipment, according to the investor decks In the

irst quarter of 2018 alone, Bitmain had $1.9 billion in

rev-enue he company hopes to complete its IPO on the Hong

Kong Stock Exchange before the end of the year, but little is

known thus far his could be a monumental step not just for Bitmain but also for the larger cryptocurrency commu-nity he industry has been attempting to nudge its way back into the spotlight ater a brief frenzy over cryptocurrencies that began at the end of 2017 Ater the investor decks were leaked, however, uncertainty over mining-rig sales in 2018 have raised doubts over the feasibility of a $14 billion-size IPO So watch this space

In recent years, worldwide concerns over

greenhouse gas emissions and their

criti-cal impact on the environment have picked

up pace Anticipating the growing need to

address climate change, Royal DSM, the

world’s largest maker of vitamins by volume,

has stayed ahead of the curve It decided

nearly a decade ago that corporate profit

cannot come at the expense of society or

the environment, rather, sustainability is

syn-onymous with driving profitability.

The global chemicals company is

trans-forming its health and material-based

businesses by focusing on developing

sus-tainable, innovative solutions that address

nutrition and health, climate and energy,

and resources and circularity, where the

life cycle of materials is maximized, and

products are regenerated.

“DSM’s strategy is to be a

purpose-led, science-based company in

nutri-tion, health and sustainable living,” said

Dimitri de Vreeze, who sits on the group’s

managing board and oversees operations

in Asia “We will deliver on performance

to earn the right to be a purpose-led business,” underscoring DSM’s earnings growth over past years.

“Ten years ago, people were saying either you want to help the world or you want to make money and decide [between the two],” said de Vreeze “That is, either you are a NGO [nongovernmental orga- nization wanting to help the world] or a private company wanting to make money.”

“But we said no—that goes hand in hand

as over time, customers won’t accept the products and services of companies who ignore their impact on society,” he said.

Most for-profit businesses are aware that their operations have a significant impact on others While balancing the need to perform competitively, shifting expectations have led businesses to pub- lish separate sustainability and annual financial reports.

DSM has published a fully integrated annual report for the past five years as the firm believes its finances, its impact

on society and the planet’s sustainability are mutualistic

The group’s strong earnings growth underpins the strength of its revised cor- porate strategy, which focuses on inno- vative solutions across its nutrition and materials business units: nutrition and health, climate and energy, and resources and circularity.

It s first-quar ter net profit for 2018 more than doubled year on year to €331 million (US$388 million) as sales rose 13%

to €2.4 billion (US$2.8 billion), ing the company to raise its full-year earnings expectations The firm set two financial targets for 2019-2021: a high single-digit annual percentage increase

prompt-in adjusted Ebitda, and an about 10% average annual increase in adjusted net operating cash flow.

DSM is developing fortified rice as part of an integrated approach to optimal nutrition

Sustainability is a core platform for the Netherlands-based group as it transforms its businesses to capture growth opportunities in health, nutrition and materials, according to management board member Dimitri de Vreeze

DSM IN MOTION:

DRIVING SUSTAINABILITY

DSM’s evolution into a nutrition, health

and sustainable living company

contin-ues to keep the 116-year old organization

ahead of the competition The company

started off as a small, coal-mining outfit

before moving onto petrochemicals When

it was privatized in 1985, DSM shifted from

chemicals to specialty chemicals Over the

past 15 years, the Euronext-listed group

expanded its scope, adding nutrition

and life sciences businesses to its market

line-up.

De Vreeze has been part of that

jour-ney for 27 years, having worked across the

world in countries that included Italy,

Swit-zerland and Hong Kong in addition to the

Netherlands, as DSM embarked on new

challenges every two to three years.

He is a firm believer in transforming DSM

into a purpose-led business, or a company

where corporate decisions are based on

a purpose beyond profit and are aimed

at improving the world, through the three

focus areas of sustainability: nutrition,

cli-mate change and renewable energy, and

the circular economy These, according

to de Vreeze, are the critical points where

DSM can make a difference.

Future-Proofing

Much of the world’s population suffers from

too much or too little food, which has led

to nutrition becoming a key sustainability focus area for DSM.

About 500 million people in Asia suffer from malnutrition, which poses a severe threat to global health At the other extreme, there has been a worldwide surge

in obesity-linked diseases such as vascular conditions and cancers, which have been linked to processed food with low nutritional value.

cardio-‘’Among the solutions DSM has oped to address malnutrition is fortified rice While rice is a staple food across many regions, when consumed by itself, it tends

devel-to have insufficient nutritional value,” said

de Vreeze DSM provided the technology

to fortify rice kernels, where rice is blended with essential nutrients, as a solution to meet nutritional requirements, and have seen improvements in the health of migrant workers in Singapore One serving of forti- fied rice is estimated to have 10 times the nutritional value of regular rice.

DSM is also working on introducing tified rice to other parts of Asia, plugging nutritional gaps in school-age children

for-in Chfor-ina, India and Cambodia as well

as Indonesia

With its unique science-based tencies, DSM is working with its associate firm, digital health company Mixfit, on a device that analyzes an individual’s diet

compe-with personalized health goals The ing data recommend prepared drinks needed to meet nutrition requirements throughout the day.

result-Beyond human nutrition, DSM also produces animal feed—but with a differ- ence Targeted at markets with high dairy production, it is developing a safe animal feed additive to reduce methane emis- sions from cow eructation (burps) by as much as 30%.

As part of the sustainability initiative around climate change and renewable energy, DSM’s efforts toward reducing the world’s carbon footprint involves low- ering greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain.

The company’s focus on using renewable energy can be seen in several investments with wind farms and solar plants In India, DSM will utilize a solar plant to meet a quar- ter of its Pune plastics facility’s electricity upkeep This aligns with the country’s exist- ing plans to have renewable power account for 40% of its total installed capacity by

2030, up from the present 20%.

China is even further ahead in ability efforts as the nation harnesses solar power The country was accountable for almost half of the world’s investments in renewable energy last year, according to Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance forecast The company also produces Dyneema

sustain-—a fiber several times stronger than steel with a low carbon footprint Dyneema is

a core material in manufacturing electric vehicles, playing a significant role toward reducing global emissions.

The third pillar of its sustainabilit y focuses on a circular economy, aiming to reduce new waste creation through smarter product design, and reusing and recycling

of base materials.

Carpets are a major source of landfill around the world, but new technology from DSM-Niaga allows for recycling, de Vreeze said The product and technology behind DSM-Niaga produces carpets that are recyclable, in part by reducing the number of materials used

With several, intricate steps taken to ensure sustainability today and tomor- row, the company’s future looks bright At the same time Asia is leading the way in advocating for sustainability for firms and end-users through planet-friendly initia- tives DSM hopes to create further signifi- cant value for its partners and end-users through organic growth, with a coherent set of business activities toward sustain- able living.

DSM project Clean Cow is focused on developing a safe animal feed additive that

reduces methane emissions created through the digestive process of cattle