Billion Dollar Moves™ with Sarah Chen-Spellings | Global Venture Capital · Sarah Chen-Spellings

Legacy, Innovation, and the Future of ASEAN Agri-Food w/ Ho Ren Hua, CEO of Thai Wah PCL

December 18, 2025·45 min·3 clips

A CEO prioritized human life over profits during COVID.

The market lens is ASEAN. Sarah starts with family businesses that survived war, reconstruction, and reinvention, then brings that history into capital, food systems, and the grind of operating through pressure. The guest begins with COVID. The priority was plain: do everything possible not to lose a life, even with performance and restructuring pressure still on the table. The company has a long memory. With businesses described as over 30 and over 70 years old, and Thai Wah framed as a 77-year-old family enterprise, legacy comes across as a working habit, not a wall display. Reinvention shows up in the numbers. The guest points to more than 100 SKUs and says 30 to 40% of revenue did not exist 10 years ago. New adjacencies take time. Pilots, scaling, new countries, and fresh revenue streams sound like multi-year work, not one tidy strategy slide. Family backing mattered when things got rough. When the board pushed for performance after tough external events, the guest remembers his dad saying the family was in it with him. Risk stays very real: fire safety, wastewater, cybersecurity, and the daily exposure that comes with manufacturing. Cambodia brings it home. A tapioca factory faced shelling about 20 kilometers away, which led to evacuation, local supply chain checks, donations, and a partial restart within two weeks. The operating idea is response time. Leadership means carrying the company rain or shine, and the episode keeps that quiet discipline. Sarah closes on allocation stakes: food, energy, water, resilient supply chains, and long term margin across ASEAN.

As heard by us

A family-business story about crisis response, operational risk, and long-term growth in ASEAN food.

The piece keeps its focus where it should be: on a family-run food business in ASEAN and the practical work of keeping it steady through a bad stretch.

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Why you'd press play

You want an ASEAN food story told through crisis, scale, and ownership.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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