The optimistic, crazy 'ang moh' who founded TDCX in his Singapore apartment

With a shoestring budget that he meticulously managed so that it would outlast his sales cycle – and no proper office to boot – TDCX group chief executive Laurent Junique hired and trained his first batch of telemarketing staff at cafe-bakery Delifrance. That was in the mid-1990s.

The founder of the then-startup was operating out of his apartment and using a post office box as a corporate address. He had just clinched his first major client, American Express, after an earlier business failure.

“I had very little capital, but ... instead of trying to look good upfront, I decided that I should be super conservative with cost,” said Junique, the Businessman of the Year named at this year’s Singapore Business Awards.

Not only did Junique have to be tight-fisted, the entrepreneur also had to contend with his youth – he was not yet 30 years old – the lack of track record, as well as cultural differences in his early startup days. Then, telemarketing was also still a novel business concept.

“At the time, I didn’t have white hair, and it showed. People were not taking me seriously, and they were saying ‘What is this ang moh doing here?’.”

Ang moh means red-haired in Hokkien and is a colloquial term for Caucasian.

When he was prospecting a local financial institution, the Frenchman was told: “You don’t understand, we are Chinese, we don’t do business by phone.”

“It made me laugh, because in France, the French were exactly the same… they said… we’re French. (Telemarketing) is an American thing,” an amused Junique recounted.

The achievements

But TDCX went on to be the provider of business process outsourcing for services including customer experience and digital marketing to many companies in the city-state, with the iconic Singapore Airlines being one of them. Internationally, it counts Meta and Airbnb as the global clients it is allowed to identify.

Notably, the group has been profitable every year since its inception three decades ago, but not without its resilience having been tested by the Asian financial crisis, dot.com crash, the Great Recession, and COVID. It has zero debt.

The group clinched the Enterprise Award at the Singapore Business Awards 2022, impressing the judges with its persistence and savviness in internationalisation, despite being in the competitive world of digital customer experience solutions.

As for Junique, Singapore became the place where he built up his business empire. It is also where he has lived for more than two decades. He is married to a Singaporean, and they have three children aged 23, 22, and 18.

He is a naturalised Singaporean now, after obtaining citizenship in 2023.

“I’m happy here… This is the country I’ve lived in for most of my life. So I thought it made sense to be in Singapore, and I’m here to stay.” The entrepreneur will celebrate his 60th birthday – as will Singapore – this year. The Asian country that intrigues

Singapore was no stranger to Junique before he moved here. His parents travelled a lot for work, and had lived in the Asia-Pacific region when he was younger, and the city-state was often a stopover in their travels.

When he was studying in university in France, the Economic Development Board of Singapore was frequently promoting to the European country the rise of Singapore as one of the four Asian tiger economies, which were experiencing rapid industrialisation and enjoying an economic boom.

That intrigued Junique and prompted him to resign from his Unilever salesman job to check out the city-state in 1991.

Armed with S$10,000 seed funding from his parents and years of their pep talks, Junique set off for the Republic to seek his fortune. “I think I’m a bit crazy, to be honest. If you’re not a bit crazy, you don’t do this kind of things… Why not? Why be conventional? But at that time… I didn’t have a family. I had no responsibility. So I knew I could take risks.”

When he came to Singapore, he found it to be a conducive place to start a business. It also had the potential to become a launchpad to the Asian region.

“Singapore was attractive in the sense that it provided safety… Everybody spoke English. You didn’t feel like you were in a foreign country as a beginner and, in retrospect, it was a good choice. Because as much as Singapore – I felt at the time – had an edge in Asia, and it was a great platform to start, it continued to outperform itself over the years and become better and better, and keep up with the times and the changes.”

He did consulting work initially, then set up a business to pursue entrepreneurship – something he had dreamt of doing since 13 years old. But that failed to take off.

The entrepreneur, however, was undeterred and soon founded Teledirect – the former name of TDCX – in 1995. “I think learning from the mistakes, after so many failures, (I) eventually got to a point where you get it right.” Before this, Junique had tried his hand at other business ventures in France but those did not last.
 

Big break

Clinching the business from the payments powerhouse American Express was a big break for Junique – it provided him with a much-needed track record, and it was paying him on time.

Soon, he got Pacific Internet as the next client. Similarly, this client required the outsourced staff from TDCX to work at its premises, like American Express, freeing Junique from investing in infrastructure.

Then a global advertising company and an international insurer were added to his clientele. Soon, these clients saw the complementarity between TDCX and their business, and wanted to own a share in it.

Junique sold a 40 per cent stake in his company for a six-figure amount to the advertising behemoth in 1997.

The money gave comfort to the self-employed then 30-year-old, in knowing that he was making as much as his salaried peers.

The stake sale marked the start of him making inroads into the region.

It also made him realise that he had not negotiated the shareholding agreement very well.

“This was a big multinational, and I was a nobody with a very small business. So my bargaining power was not very strong… Still, it was a good deal for me at the time, given where I was.”

He re-acquired his stake from the minority shareholder in 2018 at 120 times the price at which he sold it, after assessing that the 20-year partnership was not as relevant as it was intended to be.

Then came COVID, which disrupted the business of TDCX as its travel and hospitality clients were severely hit. It was the first time that the company had to lay off workers, albeit only a small percentage of its staff was affected, as clients from streaming platforms and digital advertising picked up the slack from those in the upended sectors.

TDCX marked the end of COVID with a stock market flotation on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. It planned to use the shares for acquisitions to catapult it to the global arena.

“There were different forces that we were trying to address. One of them is that we had to become global at the time. We were regional, and we were transitioning into a global company.

We had to, because our clients were global, and we were concerned that they would want to narrow the number of suppliers and only work with big global suppliers,” said Junique.

“We need to raise our profile. We need to raise capital. We need to acquire companies in other geographies, or do some organic growth and have more publicity.”
 

Not retiring

By then, the corporate honcho was already 56 years old – but in his own words, he became “even more crazy with age”.

Junique said it’s risky in this business for the company to keep still and slowly see it decline. So he feels that the only way forward is to take calculated risks.

A re-rating of the sector ignited by lowball takeovers by some industry players prompted Junique to review TDCX’s public listing status.

He went on to delist TDCX in 2024.

When Junique sold his 40 per cent share in 1997, he had a three-year plan for TDCX to go regional, and that dream was upgraded at the time of the public listing, to become a global player. Now, he has a bigger dream, but he is keeping it under wraps from the public for the time being.

While his competitors managed to scale up a lot faster by diluting their equity to raise funds, Junique took a slower route but kept the reins as he wanted to be the one driving the business.

As the group evolved and headcount increased, Junique’s role transitioned from being an operator to an orchestra conductor. But the change was not without struggles for him, as he had to remind himself not to micro-manage and at times questioned his own usefulness. Meanwhile, he decided that his children will not take over TDCX, so as to spare them the pressure of being the boss’s offspring. Also, it will be fair to his employees who have worked hard to have a shot at leading TDCX. But they would have to wait a while.

Junique, who sees the 96-year-old Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing as his beacon, said: “I’m not ready to retire... I would like to continue in this capacity, because it’s interesting.”

Source: The Business Times ©️ SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.