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With an immense experience as a corporate venture specialist, ST Chua recently joined Ikano Insight as its Regional Business Director of SEA. His primary task is to lead the company’s growth in Southeast Asia, helping both corporates to grow startups on any customised advanced analytics needs.

Before this role, he was heading PETRONAS Dagangan’s digital transformation “SWAT team” TipTop. His achievements included streamlining maintenance processes to significantly reduce equipment downtime at retail fuel stations nationwide and introducing an internal super app for dealers across 1060 stations.

Chua has developed a multi-million-dollar international e-commerce business and is a co-founder of an FMCG distribution firm, a predictive analytics company and a fintech startup.

He enjoys mentoring startups and frequently speaks at technology-related events. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, France.

In this candid interview, Chua talks about his personal and professional life.

How would you explain what you do to a 5-year-old?

To 5-year-olds who like chocolates, I will say that I manage a team to help the company selling those chocolates, and I want to determine what type of chocolates he/she likes. I will also ask the kid how much to price those chocolates, what else to bundle with, and how to ensure a sufficient supply of chocolates, optimising the retail location where he or she is most likely to buy those chocolates. This is to ensure you are one happy kid eating those healthy chocolates.

What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?

There have been many challenges throughout my career. I would go with the most recent when I was the General Manager and Head of TipTop at PETRONAS Dagangan Bhd, where I led a special “SWAT team” to look into digital transformation and automation.

The business has been running for 40+ years, with strongly defined processes, multiple stakeholders, and people staying there for a long time. Naturally, someone new coming to do the transformation with no prior background in the industry will be questioned and challenged. Trying to execute transformation at pace and scale in that environment is challenging. My team and I had to put tremendous focus on change management.

The second part of the challenge was introducing innovation or new technologies to a company with the largest retail network in the country with over 1000 sites. For example, to introduce IoTs or smart cameras, the business model needs to accommodate the additional cost of three zeros behind, which is a challenge when business margins are thin.

As a leader in PETRONAS, we are also responsible for upholding the trust put on us to manage the country’s resources (we call it Amanah in Malay) and ensuring that our investments create substantial value. So there’s always a trade-off between cool technologies vs practically, long-term investment vs short-term gains to balance.

Also Read: What Pierluigi Cau loves most about working at GitHub

Besides delivering our plan, the highlight was building a high-performing team with strong startup culture — always steadfast, agile and standing together despite the pressure and challenges.

How do you envision the next five years of your career?

I hope to continue pushing my career’s boundaries, busy solving complex problems or pain points. What excites me about Ikano Insight is that data and technology adoption is growing exponentially. This company is an expert in helping others be it large corporates, to scale-ups to make sense of data, transforming them into useful insights.

The other exciting thing about Ikano Insight is its ability to help companies meet upcoming ESG compliance since we have the know-how to track and monitor ESG using global standards that we utilise ourselves across the group. How many analytics companies in Southeast Asia can say they have a sustainability practice? There is so much to learn about ESG and sustainability, which is exciting.

Sometime down the road, I wouldn’t discount the possibility of setting up my own VC fund to help startups since I have experience setting funds up from scratch, scaling and exiting companies.

What are some of your favourite work tools?

I use Trello a lot as a Kanban board for myself (Trello should give me an award for being their biggest evangelist since 2012 when no one at that time knew about it in this part of the world). I also use Slack for communication with different teams and projects, Jira for product development, Miro for brainstorming, Google Calendar, Microsoft suite of products (Sharepoint, Word, Powerpoint and Excel), and last but not least, sticky notes.

What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Ever since I joined Ikano Insight, I found five points that seem to surprise people about my job and the company:

• Ikano is not a Japanese company despite sounding like one. It is owned by the late IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad’s family from Sweden.
• Being the youngest entity in the Ikano Group, we are more like a startup than a corporate.
• We are not merely an internal data arm to serve the Ikano and IKEA companies but a standalone insight and advanced analytics company providing services internally and to external clients, be it corporates or scale-ups. So you will see my team and me out and about for business development.
• We are technology agnostic. We use what clients are comfortable with and perfectly fine to work on their existing technology stack.
• One of our largest focuses is sustainability. We use data and technology to monitor sustainability efforts and automate ESG reporting.

Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?

As someone from the startup and venture capital world, I am used to working from anywhere with a laptop, so it does not make a difference to me. So instead of WFH, I would call it WFA (work from anywhere).

Also Read: What Samar Sen’s life looks like while heading Talos in APAC

To me, the world has progressed so much in adopting digital tools that enabled us to work entirely online for two years. Why revert? One has to be practical about it and think about how to maximise productive time, and if there is a need to have a face-to-face meeting, then do that to not lose the personal touch.

What would you tell your younger self?

Experience as much as possible, try new things, go to new places, and study different languages. It’s increasingly becoming a globalised world without borders, especially in the digital space and the ability to relate to surroundings, have empathy and communicate across cultures is crucial.

Can you describe yourself in three words?

Curious, simple, trustworthy.

What are you most likely to be doing if not working?

I have lots of dogs, so I would probably be walking them, bringing them hiking or socialising with other dogs to drain their energy, or else they would be up to mischief at home. Otherwise, you would find me in some café mentoring startups or brainstorming the next business idea with people of similar interest.

What are you currently reading/listening to/ watching?

I finished reading the book Touching the Void. It’s a real-life account of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes when disaster struck. It is a story of extraordinary resilience and willpower to survive. A brilliant book that I would recommend reading.

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