Sitting Pretty

With KKR riding pillion, billionaire Ron Sim is retooling his massage chair and luxury tea businesses into a regional wellness giant.

- Pamela Ambler

Pulling an IPO is generally not a sign of corporate con-fidence. Ron Sim knew that. It was early 2018, and he was on the brink of relisting the company he had taken private just two years earlier, the company that made him a billionaire. The syndicate of underwriters was lined up, the prospectus was out and Hong Kong’s exchange had given the green light for a listing by his company Vision Three (V3) and its flagship OSIM unit.

Then Sim shut the deal down. “I felt it might not be the best time,” says Sim, 61. His instincts were right: Hong Kong, it turned out, was at the start of an eight-month tailspin that would wipe nearly $600 billion off its market capitalization that year, its worst slide in seven years.

Sim was also confident he could get a better deal. Even as he was arranging the IPO, he was being courted by potential private investors. Last December, KKR emerged as the victor, investing S$500 million ($367 million) for what Forbes Asia estimates is roughly a third of V3. “It took them almost a year to do due diligence,” says Sim in his first one-on-one interview since the deal. “It helps us because it helped to crystalize things, which is good for any business.”

Together, Sim and his executives are working with KKR to get V3 firing on all cylinders. Top priority was OSIM, one of the top 10 massage chair brands in the world, according to U.K.based research firm TechNavio. With KKR, Sim and his team reorganized OSIM’s network of stores to better tap Northeast Asia’s increasingly urban middle class and souping up V3’s luxury tea brand, TWG, into an even bigger global player. “The commonalities here is that he wanted to grow,” says Jaka Prasetya, a Singapore-based KKR partner who negotiated the deal. “And obviously us being a global player, we provide him connectivity.”