“Most of the time we will be visiting our clients at their respective office locations, therefore our current office space is very much underutilised. By giving up our office space, we will be able to save a lot in terms of operations costs. These savings can be translated into paying our staff better wages and also giving back some of these savings to our shareholders,” Mak says in an interview with The Edge Singapore.
Intraco has reinvented itself time and again. Founded in 1968 as a shoe-maker, it was listed in 1972 and taken under Temasek Holdings, becoming Singapore’s key importer of rice and other strategic supplies. Over the years, it expanded into a variety of commodities and manufactured goods, and at one point even distributed Lada cars from the then Soviet Union.
Today’s Intraco, reshaped by new management and shareholders, is a far cry from its former self. Under executive chairman Mak Lye Mun, the company plans to apply this whole pattern of transformation to how it physically operates. By the end of this year, Intraco will close its office and have all 30 employees work from home, a move Mak says could make it the first Mainboard-listed company here to operate fully remotely.
