Ganesh Kumar Bangah
Group CEO, MOL Global Pte Ltd
CEO, MOL AccessPortal Sdn Bhd (Money Online)
(Technology)

GANESH Kumar Bangah made headlines as Malaysia’s youngest CEO of a public listed company when, at the age of 23, he listed MOL AccessPortal (Money Online) on the Mesdaq Market of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange in 2003.

Ganesh, now 33, said some senior personnel did not trust his ability in the beginning due to his youth. But over time he managed to gain their respect and trust.

“I would definitely do it all over again. But with the benefit of hindsight, I would have focused more on building the company before listing it so early and gone regional much earlier to stimulate growth,” he said.

Harbouring a vision to be the “Bill Gates of Asia”, Ganesh, at the startling young age of 20, built Money Online from scratch into one of the biggest online payment service providers in Asia. Money Online handles over 60 million transactions annually on 600,000 physical payment channels across 75 countries, with an annual payment volume of over US$300 million (RM918 million) and an annual revenue of US$150 million.

Some may recall the disbelief when he, through MOL, bought Friendster, the world’s pioneering but floundering social network in December 2009. In 2010, MOL sold 18 Friendster patents involving social networking to Facebook and now owns 3.5 million shares in Facebook Inc, which it wants to sell at an opportune time.

Ganesh’s first step to becoming an entrepreneur in the IT space can be traced back to his secondary school days in Johor when he used his skills to make money, like repairing his teachers’ computers for a fee. With a sharp eye for business, he would travel to Singapore to buy computer parts which he then re-sold to his schoolmates for a profit.

After Form Five, he worked for and later became a partner in Cyberfield, a small but successful software company. This was when Ganesh developed his first software, a management system to help cybercafé operators charge customers. Taking advantage of the Internet craze in the late 1990s, Ganesh started giving the software for free to about 15,000 cybercafés in 170 countries. This served as the platform for the growth of MOL’s business to what it is today.

It is interesting to learn that, not unlike the world’s wealthiest college dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg), Ganesh studied engineering at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia but dropped out in his third year to pursue his dotcom dreams.

During the dotcom bubble in 2000, MOL secured its initial funding from Berjaya group’s Tan Sri Vincent Tan, a conservative RM2 million for a 60% stake. This was one of Tan’s smallest investments then, but it made money.

In 2008, MOL received a buyout offer from Yahoo for over three times MOL market’s capitalisation at the time.  However, it was believed that MOL was grossly undervalued and both Tan and Ganesh did not sell their stake.

Ganesh currently runs MOL Global, a company worth over RM1 billion, with two wholly-owned subsidiaries, MOL Access Portal Bhd and Friendster.

The techno entrepreneur, with his business motto “Never take NO for an answer”, hopes to continue growing MOL outside Asia, capitalise on the growth of e-commerce and mobile applications. Within the next three to five years, he plans to re-list the company he privatised in 2008 to pursue a regional expansion strategy.

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on Nov 26, 2012.