The Rags to Riches Tale of Peter Lim – Our next owner?

Liverpool takeover bidder Peter Lim is a self-made billionaire if there ever was one. A son of a fishmonger, he grew up with three brothers and four sisters in one of Singapore’s oldest public housing estates, Bukit Ho Swee. With eleven people in a 2 bedroom government flat, he invariably slept in the living room or wherever he could put his mattress down. He completed his secondary education before travelling to Perth in Australia to study at the University of Western Australia. To fund his education he took a number of part time jobs including as a waiter, a taxi driver and a cook. It was while he was a cook at a fast food chain Red Rooster that he began to learn the ins an outs of how a business worked. He saw first hand how a company started, grew and scaled up.

He graduated from university with an accounting and finance degrr but he got off to an inauspicious start in his first job as an accountant which only lasted three months. He went into tax consultancy before finally becoming a stock-broker – something he had always wanted to get into after buying his first shares at age 18. He quickly made a name of himself on the Singapore Stock Exchange and became popularly known as the “King of the Remisiers,” a Remisier being an agent of a Stock-broking company who gets paid commission for every transaction.

After many years making investments for others, he decided to become an investor himself, and how did it pay off. In the early 90s he invested a $10million 5% stake in a Palm Oil firm called Wilmar International; the stake today is now worth $700million. Lim’s philosophy is simple: be patient. He said in an interview:

“You have to invest with a longer-term mindset. You buy a good stock, leave it there for 10 years. Come 10 years, this dollar can be many, many multiples. I think the trick is really to think long-term. You may not have a lot of money, but you have a lot of time. The minimum length of my investments are five to six years, if not 10 to 12 years.”

Lim is not too choosy in his investments as long as they have good prospects for the future. He rarely checks the daily goings on a stock market and rarely loses sleep if he loses money:

“If I think solar is good, I go into solar; if I think palm oil is good, then palm oil. Share prices go up because the sector grows. So if I think this sector is going to be good in the next 10 years, then I’ll just invest in it. . . When you are holding stocks, if it goes up, don’t be too happy; when it goes down, don’t be too sad. Otherwise, how? Your life will also be fluctuating and you’ll die of a heart attack. If you really lose sleep over it, maybe the best way is to keep the money in the bank.’

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