CEO Series – “He Bought A Company For S$1 To Start Own Tech Firm, Now Serves S$33B Construction Industry”
1 August 2019, Thursday
Vulcan Post did an exclusive coverage of Intercorp and our CEO Kelvin Koh’s journey of founding the company, its early days and challenges, to serving more than 60% to 70% of Singapore’s $33B construction industry today!
We may not have much land, but Singapore never stops building.
There are constantly new BTO flats, condominiums, office towers, shopping malls or even airport terminals up and coming.
According to the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), the total value of contracts awarded to construction projects is predicted to stand between S$27 billion and S$32 billion at the end of 2019.
Needless to say, money isn’t the only big number in the industry which relies heavily on human labour.
The construction sector had 444,700 workers employed in 2018, of which about three quarters were foreign workers.
Construction has always been crucial to the country’s development whether we notice it or not, and managing the comings and goings in this industry is a truly gargantuan task.
Companies constantly navigate the challenge of being accountable for all their employees at once, which could easily be hundreds to thousands of workers in a single construction site.
Overseeing this includes managing each employee’s personal data, ensuring only authorised personnel have access to sites, and adhering to regulations to hire workers with legal and up to date permits.
Under these heavy loads, companies grapple with difficulties to generate and store insane amounts of paperwork, and along with it comes a lot of time needed to sift through and analyse all this information on hand.
Considering the high-risk environment they operate in, there’s no room for error.
Where regular folks just see noisy and dusty construction sites turn into shiny new buildings, one Singaporean thought about how he could solve these problems going on behind the scenes.
38-year-old Kelvin Koh is the founder and CEO of Intercorp, a technology company that builds solutions to help enterprises manage manpower.
