KUALA LUMPUR, March 12 — He is the son of a butcher, the seventh of 10 children and hails from Butterworth, Penang. Goh Peng Ooi also happens to be Malaysia’s first tech billionaire and is worth US$1.55 billion (RM5.7 billion)
Forbes magazine reported today that the stock price for the company he founded, Silverlake Axis, more than quadrupled since early 2012, making it one of South-east Asia’s most valuable technology companies.
And since the 60-year-old owns two-thirds of the company, his net worth went up 41 per cent in just one year.
In an interview with the business magazine, the founder of the top banking software provider in the country said he took a leap of faith in 1989 to set up his own company after being in tech giant IBM for almost a decade.
“Better to do it when [my daughter] was 3 than when she was 13.
“If I failed, I thought it would be better if she never knew her father had once been so successful.
“And my wife and I knew that whatever happened, at least we could pay for her schooling,” he said, as reported in the magazine’s March issue.
Today, his daughter is an executive director at the company in Petaling Jaya, while his son does not work for the company.
According to its web site, 40 per cent of the top 20 largest banks in the region now uses its core banking solution.
The magazine reported that Goh has been selling software to banks for more than 25 years but is more comfortable talking about math or philosophy, than business.
“I probably should have been a professor,” he said.
Described as affable and quirky, he joked that he doesn’t often get invited back to dinner with his social skills of a mathematician.
But when asked how he is adjusting to the new league he has entered, he said, “Actually, it’s not so hard to lead a billionaire’s life.
“It’s easier to have things than not to”.
Goh was the only one in his family to go to college with the help of a scholarship from the Japanese government to study at the University of Tokyo.
He started with nuclear physics but later switched to electrical engineering.
He went to work for IBM in the US for almost a decade, and moved quickly up the ranks to head its Asia banking solutions group by the late 1980s.
He saw how banks were not using technology and decided to seize the opportunity. So in 1989, after some deliberation, he quit to launch Silverlake Axis, the magazine reported.
Silverlake was the codename for an IBM business computer launched at the end of his tenure there.
The company thrived, in part, because Goh entered the market at the right time, it noted.
In the late 80s and early 90s, financial services companies in Asia began to modernise. For all but the biggest banks, building their own systems was too expensive. So after Goh set out on his own, he was able to close three deals worth more than US$1 million within months.
Silverlake Axis licenses its software to banks, has its engineers install it and collects a recurring maintenance fee.
Although the company is not big, it expects to tally just US$156 million in revenue for the year ending June 30 with net profit margins expected to reach close to an impressive 50 per cent.
But with barriers to entry now high and customers invested too much to likely make a switch, the company suggests only a 15 per cent rise in net profits this year.
Today the company boasts customers in 20 countries across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, but its core market remains in Southeast Asia.
Goh told the magazine that he is also working on a technology for mobile phones, which he explained in his “characteristic unintelligible manner”, but promises that it’s the future of computing.
“It’s hard to predict whether that’s the would-be professor talking or the businessman with excellent timing,” the report wrote.
