Chua Cheng Bok and his brother Cheng Liat opened a sundries shop in Kuala Lumpur in 1899, near where Pasar Seni station stands now. They sold soap and screwdrivers and nutmeg, and then they began selling bicycles and carriages, and they renamed the firm after those two things.
They had just named their company after a trade the motor car was ten years from ending.
In 1951 the same firm took the Mercedes-Benz distributorship. The thing that killed the carriage business paid the wages for the next seventy-five years.
On 21 August, Jardine Cycle & Carriage agreed to sell that business. S$265 million, about US$208 million, to Prajogo Pangestu’s Chandra Asri, an Indonesian petrochemical group buying six facilities in Singapore and eleven in Malaysia.
Jardine said the sale lets it focus on its core markets in Indonesia and Vietnam. The proceeds repay debt.
Two days before that announcement, a Category A certificate of entitlement in Singapore closed at S$128,501, within a few hundred dollars of the record set in July.
Nobody in the showroom sets that number.
It is decided twice a month in a bidding system, by a quota nobody in the trade controls, and it decides how many cars a dealer sells this quarter and at what margin. You have a version of it. A tariff line, a model price per million tokens, a landlord’s renewal, a licence regime rewritten in a budget speech.
The number that governs your business is set in a room you are not in, by people who have never heard your name.
The number that governs your business is set in a room you are not in, by people who have never heard your name.
Epictetus was born a slave and lame, and taught the fullest version of the response. Do not seek for things to happen as you wish; wish them to happen as they do, and your life will go well.
Later readers gave that posture a Latin name, amor fati, the love of what happens. It is the hardest of the Stoic postures to hold, because it asks for something past acceptance.
Amor fati asks you to treat the number as material rather than as a verdict.
Amor fati asks you to treat the number as material rather than as a verdict.
The distinction is practical and you can test it this week. A verdict tells you what your business may no longer be, and the only responses to a verdict are appeal and grief. Material tells you what can be built with the thing in front of you, and the responses to material are all moves.
Two parties read the same Singapore number this month and both treated it as material.
Jardine looked at a business that had traded in the same two countries since 1899, priced the position at S$265 million, and moved the money to Jakarta and Hanoi. Chandra Asri looked at the same throttled market and bought a business with a captive service base, ten months after agreeing to buy the roughly 60 Esso stations in the same country.
One decided the ceiling was real. The other decided the floor was worth owning. Neither spent a sentence arguing that the ceiling should not exist.
That is the whole discipline, and it is unglamorous in practice.
You do not have to be grateful for the number. You have to work with the version of the market the number actually creates, this quarter, at the size you actually are, rather than the one you would have if the auction went differently.
The brothers named their company for the carriage in 1899, and the carriage was finished. They spent the next century selling the machine that finished it, and this month somebody paid a quarter of a billion dollars for what they built out of a bad name.
Whatever arrives next is the next hundred years of the business, if you will pick it up.