Identifying possible targets

BEING in a "fortunate" cash position is spurring Goldis Bhd to actively look at Malaysian companies with "cutting-edge" businesses, says its head of corporate investments Colin Ng.

Goldis, he points out, is not a "pure" PE firm as it doesn't operate by the normal rules.

"What we do is make direct investments, we are not involved in third-party funds," he says.

As at Jan 31, Goldis had deposits, cash and bank balances of some RM160mil, based on its financial statement to Bursa Malaysia.

Ng says the firm tries to fill the void where the banking space may not be able to.

"While we tend to avoid pure ideas on paper, we help start-up companies with bright ideas, something a little on the cutting-edge to grow, all of them would usually require financial backing," he adds.

Goldis' business model is such that we take a majority stake in a firm and its entrepreneur takes a minority stake and we grow the company together, normally our investments are done over a 10-year period, Ng says.

One of its earlier investments was a 78.15% stake in specialist dermatological services Hoepharma Holdings Sdn Bhd. It received RM289.2mil cash from disposing it last year to Tokyo-listed Taisho Pharmaceutical Co.

According to Goldis, its original investment in Hoepharma was RM1.8mil made ten years ago.

Another one of its investments is a 70% stake purchase in mobile messaging technology Macro Kiosk Bhd which was acquired for RM105,000 back in February 2002.

A management buyout offer by the founders of Macro Kiosk last year which has already been accepted by Goldis will see the latter pocket some RM9.5mil gain when it is completed,

"We are in the second ten-year cycle now and the new areas we are looking at are education, healthcare and renewable energy, areas in line with enhancing people's lifestyles without being damaging to the environment.

"In fact, all the business we go into are either zero discharge or green and designed for the future," according to him.

"We haven't actually identified many new companies, we've looked at a few ... I'd like to get the word out there that if there are people with good ideas, greenfield, brownfield type of firms, we could look at investing."

Goldis owns G Tower, the group's Grade A++ office building in the Kuala Lumpur city centre. It also has investments in China where it has bought into water treatment and paper manufacturing businesses.