Building for the Future – How Tan Sri Dato’ Sri Leong Hoy Kum laid the building blocks for Mah Sing Group’s success

Tan Sri Dato’ Sri Leong Hoy Kum is a man of order and routine. Each morning, he wakes at 7.30am, exercises for an hour and – with the benefit of postworkout clarity – begins to assemble his business strategies for the day and makes calls to his heads of department at Mah Sing Group. And for everyone else in the company, this is when the working day really kicks off. “He’s got so much energy that the rest of us can barely keep up with him!” exclaims his Senior General Manager of Strategic Communications.

Moving at a brisk clip has always been Tan Sri Leong’s default setting. It’s part of the reason behind his ability to captain Mah Sing Group for 40 years, nimbly overseeing its transition from a small plastics manufacturer to one of Malaysia’s major property developers. Over the span of a quarter of a century, the company has been responsible for developments such as the i-Parc industrial integrated park series, The Icon along Jalan Tun Razak, and townships including Sri Pulai Perdana in Skudai, Aman Perdana in the Klang Valley and Meridin East in Iskandar Malaysia, Johor, selling more than 40,000 homes in total.

With a very respectable 2,099ac in its landbank and a tidy net profit of MYR271.6 million last year, many are doubtless as keen to ask as we are: where will the building blocks of Mah Sing Group be placed next?

GROW AS WE GO

Still fresh from its rebranding exercise in 2017, the company’s contemporary, future focused direction (‘Reinvent spaces. Enhance life’ is Mah Sing Group’s well-publicised tagline) has allowed it to position its strategy around supporting the supply-demand gap in Malaysia, where – between 2012 to 2017 – there were only 88,000 new houses completed per year, in comparison with the formation of 212,744 new households each year. As far back as 2013, the company began to move from selling only semi-detached properties and bungalows to offering affordable residential housing priced around MYR300,000, in line with a government initiative to boost house ownership and meet the market’s demand.

It is not, however, simply a matter of building cheap housing blindly and with little thought, Tan Sri Leong insists. “The Group’s mission of ‘reinventing affordability’ is more than just the price itself,” he says. “Our products are luxury made affordable, with strategic locations, ready amenities, green features and public transport. We’re committed to inventing sustainable future living that enhances quality of life: this is a promise we make to all our customers.” Although a recent announcement at its AGM in June signalled the company’s intention to support the government’s drive to promote affordable housing, it’s a plan that’s already been in place for several years.

“At Mah Sing Group, we always plan ahead of the cycle. We look at market trends, economic growth and feedback on the ground,” he explains. “For example, the industry has been talking about affordable housing over the past three to four years, and now, this segment of the market has the highest demand. For us, we’ve already started purchasing land that is ready for immediate development with large population growths, two to three years before the cycle changes. Other than private land, we’re also exploring opportunities in collaborating with and forming joint ventures with the government to develop projects that benefit the rakyat.”

Is providing quality housing at affordable prices genuinely feasible, though? “Quality is a mindset. It’s an attitude,” he says firmly, pointing to Southville City in KL South – a township that happens to be the biggest of its kind in the Klang Valley, which has already received an enthusiastic response due to its spacious family homes, which start from MYR380,000. “Your workmanship must be of good quality, with the only difference being the specifications of the materials. For instance, we’ll give you tiles instead of marble, but we’ll maintain the same type of quality as a property targeted at the middle-income M40 group.”

In the eyes of the Founder and Group Managing Director – who, as it turns out, happens to be a Merdeka baby – enhancing the lives of Malaysian citizens needs to go beyond bricks and mortar. “As a responsible and sustainable nation-building developer, Mah Sing Group strongly believes that we should invest back into society, and we’re doing that through a systematic and consolidated platform, Mah Sing Foundation.” Its three key pillars – education, health and well-being, and families and communities – led the foundation to donate a total of MYR3.5 million last year, in support of more than 18,000 beneficiaries across 40 NGOs and schools.

The foundation’s activities have ranged from its Pusat Sama-Sama education programme in PPR Enggang, Bandar Kinrara in Puchong, aimed at improving the reading, comprehension, and numeracy skills of 43 schoolchildren, to the Mah Sing Young Nation Builders Challenge, its latest flagship programme for youths aged between 13 and 17, which seeks to cultivate the next generation of nation-builders in school classrooms. “We place emphasis on the education of young children, who we must support – after all, they’re the leaders of tomorrow,” Tan Sri Leong affirms.

BUILDING PERFECTION

With plenty to keep Tan Sri Leong and his team at Mah Sing Group occupied – there’s the launch of Phase 2 of Icon City, Onyx Icon City in Petaling Jaya and of Ramada Meridin, Meridin Medini’s hotel service suites, as well as the completion of Covil@Meridin Bayvue and Meridin East’s Dandelion and The Fern, to name a few highlights this year – our conversation returns to his seemingly inexhaustible drive, which has continued to set an example for the company’s workforce of over 2,000 employees.

“When I was young, I had this aim of growing the business that was started by my father, and I wanted to be one of the biggest developers in the country. I had determination, passion and I wanted to make sure I could achieve my vision – and with all this in mind, I had to ‘run’ very fast,” he tells me. “I learnt a lot about the Japanese work ethic when I was sent there to study plastic technology. They’re hardworking and move really quickly, and I grew used to that fast pace – it’s just that I want all of my staff to follow the same speed too.”

While he’s keen to extol the virtues of Japan’s highly productive work culture, he remains in favour of a sensible worklife balance – for the Group’s staff, at least. “I brought in the positive side of Japan’s cultural values: punctuality, good manners, hard work, being team players and maintaining a mutual respect for each other are so important. Of course, there are practices that aren’t so advisable as well, such as pretending to stay late just to demonstrate to their boss that they’re making an effort. That drains energy unnecessarily – it should be spent on the right work.”

And what about himself, given that he’s often spotted in his office until late in the evening? “I’m a very disciplined person and I enjoy working, but at the same time, I believe in staff empowerment – which is why I delegate my work and leave it to them to execute. Now, I’m just a strategist who’s setting the direction for our company.” ‘Just a strategist’, indeed: for anyone who speaks with Tan Sri Leong at length will know that there are still big plans afoot for Mah Sing Group, which netted sales of MYR1.5 billion in 2018.

It’s not just its business model, which centres around a quick turnaround time (just look at its newly acquired land for M Oscar, located off Kuchai Lama next to Happy Garden, which was purchased in March and is already open to the public for registration, with a preview planned in the third quarter of this year), that keeps the Group’s wheels turning at a blistering pace. Tan Sri Leong is already determined to diversify beyond property: “As an example, I’m very keen on healthcare because it’s something that can take care of me when I get older!” he laughs. “It’s a growing business, rather than a sunset one, and people are much more health-conscious than before.

“I have strong views about this because I’m not so young and not so old – this is the right age of maturity where we have sufficiently strong financial support for us to start planning and looking into penetrating this industry. It need not be a hospital, but it will need to be integrated. It could be a wellness centre that we can later use to branch out into retirement homes, where it can provide assistance to older age groups to live healthily in a conducive environment with their friends. I see it as a growing industry, rather than a sunset one.

“Because I’ve built townships, they’ll need schools and universities alongside the wellness centres and hospitals, which is where we can diversify into education too. Synergism is what I’m doing, and it need not be so difficult. If you have a dream, you’ll chase it – if you don’t have a one, it will never happen.”

SING WHEN YOU’RE WINNING

An integral part of Tan Sri Leong’s future plans do, of course, involve the next generation on both a personal and professional level. “As a business owner, I can’t manage everything on my own, and the younger generation will have to take over eventually, whether we like it or not,” he responds emphatically. “That’s why 70 per cent of our company’s workforce is below 40 years of age – I knew we needed to attract good, young talent to join us. If you’re talking about building a company – a great company – you can’t sustain a large corporation without good staff.

“What we need is sustainable growth, where the old and newer generations are able to seek equilibrium. We’re fine-tuning our work culture so that we can achieve our KPIs and create a lasting company capable of leaving a legacy of excellence.” That legacy, by a stroke of luck (or years of careful cultivation), is already in the process of being passed to Tan Sri Leong’s three children – Jane, Lionel and Rachel – who are all fully involved in Mah Sing Group’s operations. “I think you do have to mould your children,” he says thoughtfully, once the subject of legacy planning is raised.

“When they were young, they’d follow me to site visits and, over lunch, I’d teach them about the business and try to instil their interest in it. But you can’t force a person into a career, especially when they’re grown up – it’s about mutual respect and giving them the freedom to choose their future. But I’m quite fortunate in the sense that my children are keen on working with me and helping me to spearhead the group.” Which is more difficult, then: raising a child or building a property? “We’re responsible for 48 projects in total, and we treat each one like a newborn baby,” he notes, acknowledging the parallels between children and property.

“Just like in property development, where we make sure we plan well while we’re holding the land, it’s the planning stage that’s most important when it comes to dealing with your children. You can’t be impatient with them, in the same way that you shouldn’t rush to complete a job. Likewise, my children will eventually be able to carry on my legacy because I know how to empower and trust them. But I’m not going to retire so soon,” he adds. “I’m still fully dedicated to building Mah Sing Group as a strong brand with a distinct concept and a reputation for quality. We need to make sure that the brand is the soul of our body.”

Once his children have taken over a larger proportion of leadership duties, than perhaps Tan Sri Leong might have a little extra time to practise swimming – his primary hobby – in his saltwater pool at home, or even try his hand at ‘wild swimming’ (a craze that’s sweeping through Europe) in the lakes and rivers of the great outdoors. “It’s good exercise! The only thing that I don’t do is swim in the sea, as I have high responsibilities. Remember,” he says with a smile, “I only take calculated risks.”