VCorp Capital

19/08/2026

In 2024, 99 Speedmart raised RM2.36bn. Malaysia's biggest IPO in seven years.

Most of it never reached the company.

Not a scandal. It was all in the prospectus. Almost nobody reads an IPO the way the person selling the shares does.

37 years. No outside capital. Already profitable.

The business didn't need the money.

So why list?

Swipe for the arithmetic.

Then the question that actually matters: if you listed tomorrow, what would you be raising for? Growth capital for the company, or liquidity for yourself?

13/08/2026

Most IPO conversations stop at the valuation.

The more useful question is what happens to the money afterwards.

In 2011, OldTown White Coffee listed on Bursa Malaysia as a kopitiam chain worth RM412 million. It was already profitable before it listed. It raised RM79.2 million, and it did not spend that money on opening more cafés.

By 2018, a global coffee group (JDE Peet's) had paid RM1.47 billion for the company.

What OldTown did with the capital in between is the part worth studying. It follows an order that any profitable business can look at and ask whether it applies to them.

👉 Swipe for the breakdown.

If you had access to capital tomorrow, what would you build over the next three to five years that you cannot build today? Tell us in the comments.

03/08/2026

You've used this company. After 25 years, it has a new name.

MyEG spent two decades as the only online door to Malaysian government services — road tax, summons, foreign worker permits. A small fee on every transaction, and no alternative.

Then the government built its own app, opened the field, and let MyEG's immigration concession expire.

So they did something interesting: they bought into HeiTech Padu — which went on to win the RM892 million contract to build Malaysia's new immigration system. The work MyEG used to do.

They lost the operating seat. So they bought the ownership seat.

There are two ways to profit from a contract: win it, or own a piece of whoever does. 👉 Swipe.

31/07/2026

We attended the Golden Eagle Award Economic Forum.

Around 250 business owners in the room. Two panels. Plenty of talk on AI, exports and price wars.

The three points that stayed with us were about capital.

1. Debt fills a gap. Capital funds a change.

Encik Mohamed Nazri Omar, President and CEO of CGC Malaysia, made a point most owners skip past.

Borrowing is not the problem. Borrowing to survive is.

If financing plugs a cash flow hole and nothing else changes, the hole is still there next quarter. Only now it costs more.

Ask what the money buys. Not whether you can get it.

2. Most rejections are structure problems, not business problems.

Small contractors get turned down because many were never incorporated and have no proper accounts. Tourism operators face rejection rates above 30%, largely because seasonal revenue does not fit a fixed repayment schedule.

Neither of those says the business is bad.

It says the business is hard for a funder to read.

That is fixable. Most owners treat it as a verdict.

3. The demand is policy-driven. The qualification bar is not.

YB Tuan Tze Tzin Sim, Deputy Minister of Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry (MITI), shared numbers worth sitting with.

Since March, the investment incentive framework scores multinationals on how much they source locally. Malaysia has 17 free trade agreements. The Smart Factory programme targets 3,000 participants and has around 90.

The opportunity is real. The queue is short.

But qualifying means capacity, quality systems and delivery reliability. All of which need funding. Which brings us back to point one.

29/07/2026

Hong Kong just added Bursa Malaysia to its Recognised Stock Exchange list.

Plain English: if you're already listed on Bursa's Main Market, you can now apply for a secondary listing in Hong Kong. Bursa joins Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia on that list.

Same day, the SC signed an MOU with Hong Kong's SFC covering a simpler path for dual IPOs.

Here's the bit most of the coverage skips.

If you're a private company thinking about going public, this doesn't move you. It applies to companies already listed. It's an option for after, not a shortcut in.

What it does change is the ceiling.

The old objection to listing here has always been liquidity. Good business lists, trades thin, and the owner ends up with a valuation on paper that nobody can actually transact on. A second venue doesn't fix that overnight. But it widens the pool of investors who can eventually find you.

So take it as a reason to get the preparation right. Not a reason to rush.

Nothing got easier. The payoff for doing it properly got a bit bigger.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd (HKEX) said on Thursday that the Hong Kong stock exchange has added Bursa Malaysia as a Recognised Stock Exchange (RSE).

27/07/2026

They have 46 million followers. They don't own a single one.

Foodie Media went from a food blog making under RM1 a day to a Bursa-listed company in ten years. But the founders are honest about the catch — they call it "rented land." Most of that audience sits on a platform they don't control.

So now they're buying land of their own: live commerce, in-house productions, ticketed events.

What part of your business sits on rented land? 👇

24/07/2026

Rule we've adopted at the office: never say no to durian.

Musang King from DSR TAIKO BERHAD, straight from the orchard. Creamy, bitter in the right places, and gone faster than anyone expected.

If you're hunting for good durian, you won't go wrong here.

22/07/2026

Listed is not the same as liquid

Two Malaysian companies are on their way off Bursa.

Both gave the same reason. Nobody could sell the shares.

GuocoLand Malaysia is being taken private at RM1.10 a share through a selective capital reduction. The High Court confirmed it on 13 July. Trading stops on 30 July.

Ajinomoto Malaysia's Japanese parent proposed the same route in June, at RM20 a share, RM603.4 million in total.

The detail worth pausing on is not the price. It is the reason both put in writing.

Ajinomoto's filing noted its shares had traded an average of about 38,715 a day over five years. On that volume, a shareholder with any real position cannot get out at the screen price. They wait, or they push the price down themselves.

GuocoLand said much the same. Low trading liquidity. An opportunity for shareholders to exit.

Read that again. Two listed companies, telling their own shareholders that being listed was not giving them a way out.

Ask a founder what the endgame is and many will say listing.

Underneath that sits an assumption nobody examines. That going public is how you get your money out.

It is not. Listing gives you a venue. It does not give you a buyer.

The numbers agree. Bursa had a record number of IPOs last year. Two out of every three ended the year below their listing price.

You can reach the exit and still not get paid.

Here is the distinction that matters.

An exit event happens to you. Someone decides to buy, at a price you did not set, on a timetable you did not choose.

An exit right is something you negotiated in advance. A trigger, a valuation method, a process that runs whether or not the other side feels like it this year.

The minorities in these two companies had an exit event. They waited years, and it arrived when the controlling shareholder decided it should.

Now think about who else is in that position.

Every family business shareholder who never signed an agreement with a buy-sell mechanism. Every co-founder with no drag-along, no tag-along, no valuation formula. Every second-generation holder of shares in a company they cannot sell.

None of them are listed. All of them have the same problem.

If getting out depends on someone else deciding to buy, you do not have liquidity. You have a hope.

To be fair, listing still works for companies that need capital at scale, acquisition currency, or employee equity that means something. And a premium paid in a take-private tells you the traded price and the transaction price were two different numbers. It does not tell you which one was right. We are not going to pretend to know.

So the question is not public or private.

It is whether you designed how you get out, or assumed it.

Most owners assumed it.



------

Commentary, not investment advice. Figures from company announcements to Bursa Malaysia and published market data as at July 2026.

21/07/2026

At the Pay Day Now launch yesterday.

AmBank Group and Ramssol Group Berhad putting earned wage access on real-time payment rails. Employees can draw on wages they have already earned instead of borrowing at a higher cost.

Congratulations to both teams.

20/07/2026

Everyone celebrates the startup that raises big and grows fast.

Almost nobody celebrates the one that quietly refused to die.

StoreHub is 12 years old. 20,000 merchants. A Series B in 2025 — twelve years after starting. And a founder, Wai Hong Fong, who ran it by one unglamorous rule: every funding round came with a plan to reach profitability within 18–24 months.

Not growth at all costs. Growth that could stand on its own.

While flashier names burned through cash and disappeared, StoreHub became the boring infrastructure thousands of shops open every morning without thinking about it.

The lesson for founders: don't build to raise. Build to last. 👉 Swipe through.

Would you rather be fast and funded, or boring and still standing? 👇