🤯 Lee Biscuits: 92 Years Old, Killed by Its Own Parent

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You're setting next year's budget for your Singapore-registered company. It includes US-dollar invoices to pay in 6 or 12 months, so you're guessing the exchange rate.

In 2025, the US dollar fell 5.7% against the Singapore dollar. On US$1 million, a budget set at the start of the year was off by S$77,900. Had it gone the other way, you'd have paid S$77,900 more than planned.

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Today at a Glance:

• ☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Lee Biscuits

• ⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Kept a biscuit brand captive inside a rubber group

• 🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Your majority owner can close you while you're growing

• 🔗 The Runway Insights → How I use skills for everything

• 💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Stryv secures $11.5M (Series B) to expand its personal care and home wellness business across Asia, including Taiwan, in a round led by ACV Capital

🍪🍪🍪 Marie, iced gems, banana puffs… repeat for 92 years

• 16 May 1934 — 🍪 Lee Biscuits was incorporated in Singapore, starting with cream crackers, banana puffs and Marie biscuits.

  • One historical account says Tan Kah Kee handed his son-in-law an existing biscuit business. That link remains unconfirmed.

• 1965 — The range grew with lemon puffs, iced gems, animal cookies, chocolate- and butter-cream biscuits… and something called "cigarette sticks".

• 2 Jun 1967 — 🕯️ Lee Kong Chian died. He'd already stepped back from running the group in the 1950s, and the biscuit business carried on.

🌴 Sorry Marie, the oil palms won

• 1 Nov 2023 — 🍍 The Lee Group permanently closed Lee Pineapple, its 90+ year-old cannery in Skudai, Johor, and shifted land and capital into oil palm.

  • About 30 older workers protested their severance. A 70-year-old with 53 years of service reportedly got about RM4,000.

• 2024 — 📈 Lee Biscuits Malaysia grew net sales by 8.47%, though net profit margin slipped 0.66% (per EMIS).

• 10 Aug 2024 — The Singapore entity's main activity was switched from biscuit manufacturing to "other holding companies".

• Sep 2026 — 📨 Suppliers and customers received formal notices that production would halt.

  • Trade data shows 2,339 cartons of Lee crackers still shipped to a US importer on 22 Sep.

• Early–mid Oct 2026 — 🏷️ The factory ran several warehouse clearance sales over about 2 weeks and sold out all of its stock.

• 22 Oct 2026 — 🛑 A senior manager confirmed production had stopped for good.

  • About 300 workers stayed on until month-end to clean up. The factory was being prepped for sale — no listing, no asking price yet.

• 23 Oct 2026 — The Lee Group was restructuring to exit snack manufacturing and focus on rubber and oil palm. The company's website and social pages were offline by then too.

  • The closure wasn't due to losses.

• 31 Oct 2026 — 🔒 Was scheduled as the Pontian factory's final day, ending 92 years of Lee biscuit-making.

  • No replacement plant, contract manufacturer or new Lee brand has been announced. Nobody has said what happens to the trademarks or the recipes.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

• Your owner compares you with everything else it could do with the money.

• When your owner shuts a sister business, take it as a warning for yours.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

• 🧮 Find out the bar you're judged against

  • Ask what return your owner's main business makes on each dollar. That's the number you have to beat.

  • Report your return on capital next to revenue every quarter.

  • Jetstar Asia failed this test: in 2025, Qantas found its 13 planes could earn more in Australia and New Zealand.

• 🧭 Get the first chance to buy the business

  • Ask for a right of first offer: if your owner ever sells or closes the business, your team hears the price first.

  • Line up a lender now, so your team can act on that offer fast.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

• Loyal customers can still switch when a rival sells much the same thing.

• Find out what customers can only get from you, and put your money there.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

• 🧪 Find out why customers pick you

  • Ask your 20 best customers: "If we disappeared tomorrow, what would you buy instead?" If most name a rival straight away, you're replaceable.

  • Then score your colours, logo and pack shape on Jenni Romaniuk's Distinctive Asset Grid: how many shoppers link each one to you, and whether it points only to you.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

• Closing the factory and selling the brand are 2 separate decisions. Make the sale first.

• A brand can outlive its factory if someone else owns it.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

• 🤝🏻 Run the sale before the wind-down

  • Before any customer notice, write a short sales memo: trademarks, recipes, certificates, retailer listings, export customers and the trained team.

  • Pitch rival makers, contract manufacturers and distributors already carrying your range.

• 📚 Copy the groups that sold their brands

  • In 2007, Danone sold its biscuit arm, including LU, to Kraft for €5.3B. LU is still sold today, now under Mondelez.

  • In Jan 2026, Pan Malaysia agreed to sell 5 of its snack trademarks, including Tango and Tudor Gold, for RM7M.

  • Wait too long and you end up like Hup Teck: closed after 111 years, still with no buyer 7 months later.

🔗 The Runway Insights

• How I use skills for everything (Read)

• Tokens over hires (Read)

• How Harvey is building a frontier marketing org (Read)

• 3 ways to increase feature adoption (Read)

• Bringing the DTC ads playbook to B2B (Read)

• What's left when AI writes the code (Read)

💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar

• Stryv secures $11.5M (Series B) to expand its personal care and home wellness business across Asia, including Taiwan, in a round led by ACV Capital (More)

• Ailytics bags $7.4M (Series A) to expand across APAC, the US and the Gulf with vision AI turning industrial CCTV into real-time safety and operations insights (More)

• Dat Bike extends its $26M (Series B) with a second close as investor PIDG exits, to fund further growth of its electric motorbike manufacturing business in Vietnam (More)

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