Death is good business for Nirvana

Nirvana Asia made RM612 million last year for the rubber tapper’s son who set up the firm in 1990.

KUALA LUMPUR: Most people fear death but Kong Hon Kong realised there was big money in it. He set up a funeral service business called Nirvana and business is booming.

Nirvana Asia had revenues of USD149 million (RM612 million) last year. It has a market capitalisation of USD760 million, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Nirvana operates cemeteries, col­umbaria – for storing urns – and funeral parlours at 20 locations in Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Kong is planning a launch in Vietnam next year.

The burial sites are designed to resemble parks, with water features, temples and landscaped gardens. Chinese families typically pay respects to their ancestors at least twice a year and Nirvana wants to offer them a welcoming environment.

Overall, the FT report said, the company had a land bank of 3 million sq m, most of it in Malaysia, which generated more than 80 per cent of revenue.

It quoted analysts as saying this was sufficient for its future needs, given that Nirvana sold 100,000 sq m or so of plots last year, all earmarked for specific families.

Nirvana Asia’s founder, Kong Hon Kong Photo: K.Y. Cheng, South China Morning Post

Kong, who set up the company in Malaysia in 1990 is its chief executive. All his five children are also working for the firm.

His son, Kong Yew Foong, who is also an executive director, told the FT: “We don’t use conventional methods to sell our products. We don’t wait for the customers to come in.”

The report said that it cost about USD20,000 for a 30 sq m burial plot for a couple in Malaysia, plus USD18,000 for tomb construction and USD5,000 for monks saying prayers, food and other elements of a funeral.

For the less well-off, niches in a columbarium are about USD6,000 in Malaysia, and much more in Singapore, where land is scarce.

At these prices, customers want a better service than that offered by the average undertaker. Nirvana’s mission, the report said, was to ensure people were treat­ed in death as they would be in life and customers can re­quest anything from body massages to high-end cosmetics as part of the fun­er­al preparations.

“On your last journey, you can still ask for Shiseido [products] to touch up [the body],” Kong said, referring to the Japanese make-up brand.

Nirvana, which is listed in Hong Kong, hires agents who have survived the cut-throat worlds of life insurance and real estate and trains them to sell funerals, on a commission-only basis.

Kong Senior said there were three main advantages for its ethnic Chinese target market: ensuring the whole family could be buried in one place, relieving the stresses of ad hoc funeral planning and hedging against fast-rising land prices.

“They want peace of mind,” he told FT on a visit with his son to Hong Kong.

Born to a rubber tapper in Malaysia in 1954, he was prompted to found Nirvana by the death of his father-in-law in 1985. Organising the funeral, he was dismayed by a visit to a cemetery run by the relevant Chinese clan association.

“The grass was taller than me and they didn’t have a proper walkway. That’s when I realised I had to do something,” he was quoted as saying.

There were no private cemeteries in Malaysia and those operated by clan and religious associations were “not run well”. It took him five years of navigating bureaucracy to get the permits he needed to launch the enterprise. Betting the funeral business would be more profitable than his family’s trading company, he branch­ed out alone. “Until today I’m proved right,” he told the FT.