Malaysian Property Billionaire Jeffrey Cheah Ramps Up Healthcare Ambitions, Including Seven New Sunway Hospitals By 2030

This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Malaysia’s Richest 2024. See the full list here.

The Sunway Group Chairman, who made his name and fortune building townships across Malaysia, expects to list his healthcare business by late 2027

Luxury touches abound at Sunway Sanctuary, which occupies the top 16 floors of a newly built tower outside Kuala Lumpur. It has an infinity pool with sweeping views, a 24-hour concierge, cinema, karaoke suites, mahjong rooms, all befitting a five-star hotel.

But it’s not a hotel. Sunway Sanctuary is an upmarket take on retirement living, part of the Sunway Group’s major bet on the healthcare business, targeting private healthcare patients, medical tourists and wealthy retirees in Malaysia and beyond.

On lower floors of the tower is the Sunway Medical Centre. “When you stay in Sunway Sanctuary, and if you have a stroke or a heart attack,” says group chairman Jeffrey Cheah in an interview at Sunway’s headquarters outside Kuala Lumpur, “we wheel you straight down into the emergency room instead of calling an ambulance.” When “time is of the essence,” he emphasizes, “everything is here.”

If Cheah has a mantra, that would be it: “Everything is here.” The 79-year-old is the creator of vast living ecosystems starting with Sunway City, a former tin mine outside Kuala Lumpur that is now home, office or classroom to 200,000 people. It has everything: retail, hotels and three universities. His second township is in Ipoh, which followed the same pattern of everything on offer, including a water park. Sunway’s third is starting to grow in Iskandar Puteri in the southern state of Johor.

Now, the Malaysian billionaire wants to add more forms of healthcare to his ecosystems and elsewhere in the country, transforming Sunway’s healthcare business into a growth engine powered by a surge in medical tourism—people flying in for procedures—and Malaysia’s aging population. “We will build [Sunway Sanctuary] to go with all our hospitals,” Cheah says, adding that a village concept for the elderly could also be in the pipeline.

Analysts are bullish on Sunway’s healthcare push and see it as key to the group as a whole. In 2023, Sunway Healthcare’s revenue rose 36% year on year to 1.5 billion ringgit ($316 million), and Kuala Lumpur-based CGS International equity research director Chong Tjen-San predicts it will hit 2.3 billion ringgit in 2025. By comparison, Sunway Construction, a listed company on Bursa Malaysia and one of the group’s biggest businesses, reported annual revenue of 2.7 billion ringgit last year.

Sunway Sanctuary is an upmarket take on retirement living.

Investors are as enthusiastic. Cheah’s fortune—which is tied to his majority stake in Sunway Berhad—has more than doubled in the past 11 months. Sunway shares reached a record 3.58 ringgit in late March on the group’s healthcare plans and other pluses like its Iskandar Puteri township, where Sunway has a sizable landbank of 730 hectares, and its strong outstanding construction order book. Cheah climbed ten spots to No. 8 on Malaysia’s 50 Richest list with a net worth of $2.4 billion.

When the late Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, visited the original Sunway City in 2004, Cheah recalls, he said a “wasteland had been turned into wonderland.” It’s a memory Cheah revels in. He stumbled upon the derelict 324-hectare tin mine outside of Kuala Lumpur in the early 1970s and it reminded him of his hometown near Ipoh. His father was in the tin trade, and though it was in steep decline, he managed to send Cheah to college in Melbourne in the 1960s, where he majored in accounting. (While there he was drummer in a student band that jammed at a local pub with the late Olivia Newton John.) Upon his return home, he took a job in the accounts department at a car assembly plant. But he was uninspired. Until he saw the mine, bought it and later got the idea for Sunway City.

Health is Wealth

Sunway Healthcare, one of the group’s fastest growing businesses, is projected to hit 2.3 billion ringgit in revenue in 2025.

From the start, he thought of his townships as more than mere real estate: they were places where lives could be changed, he says, as his did through education and social mobility. “After going through what I’ve seen in life in my small town called Pusing,” he says, “I want to do good, to give back to the poor in society.” Schools have been a major focus for the townships from the start, including universities. Healthcare facilities only came in later.

In 1999, Sunway Healthcare started a hospital in the original township near Kuala Lumpur. It took two decades to open a second hospital at another development called Sunway Velocity, south of the city center, and a third opened in Penang in 2022. Sunway also operates specialist clinics, including a fertility center in Kuching and a health screening and family medicine outpost in Singapore, its first foray overseas.

IHH Healthcare and KPJ Healthcare, competing private hospital chains, have domestic capacities of 3,000 beds or more in their hospitals, compared to Sunway’s 1,148, generating revenues at least double that of Sunway. Not for long, according to Cheah’s vision. By 2030, Sunway plans to add 1,852 beds in seven new hospitals and its existing facilities, taking its total bed count to 3,000. Next year, Sunway will open its fourth hospital in Damansara, outside of Kuala Lumpur, and another will open in Ipoh, and after that in Penang, Putrajaya, Johor, Kelantan and Sarawak.

“There’s a lot of pent-up demand,” says Chong of CGS International. He cites the success of Sunway’s Penang hospital, which broke even in its first year. Typically, hospitals take at least 18 months to reach profitability, he says. Penang is a destination for medical tourists from neighboring Indonesia. And domestic demand is growing because of increased insurance coverage and the rising medical needs of an aging population. Private healthcare expenditure in Malaysia is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 7.3% over a five-year period, hitting 44.4 billion ringgit in 2027, according to BMI, a unit of global research firm Fitch Solutions.

Sunway has “quite a bit of a war chest” for expansion, says Kuala Lumpur-based RHB Investment Bank regional property sector head Loong Kok Wen. In 2021, Sunway began raising money for its ambitions, drawing interest from domestic and international investors, Cheah recalls. “All the big boys came.”

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC picked up a 16% stake in Sunway Healthcare for 750 million ringgit, valuing the business at 4.7 billion ringgit, more than half of the group’s market cap at the time. “The more they audited, the higher the value they gave us,” Cheah says. “GIC saw the value in us.”

Another financial boost came in March 2023, when it set in place a Shariah-compliant 5 billion ringgit debt facility that Sunway Healthcare can tap. Going forward, Sunway Healthcare has allocated up to 3 billion ringgit in capital expenditure for expansion through 2030, which it says will be financed with internal cash and debt.

If Sunway Healthcare goes public, which is expected to happen before late 2027—and is part of the deal with Singapore’s GIC—it will have more scope for its expansion plans. Hong Leong Investment Bank Research analyst Tan Kai Shuen estimated in a March report that an IPO could value Sunway Healthcare at as much as 28.9 billion ringgit. “At this valuation, the listed entity could potentially be the largest market capitalization IPO listing in Bursa Malaysia,” he wrote.

One challenge to Cheah’s ambitions is finding skilled staff, or as he puts it, “winning the war for talent.” In just one example, Sunway Healthcare has seven new operating theaters that aren’t being used due to a regional shortage of nurses, he says. But Cheah’s everything philosophy is helping ameliorate the problem. His township ecosystems include educational institutions like an overseas campus of Australia’s Monash University and Sunway University, which can feed nurses into the healthcare business. “We’re doing our best to attract students to take up nursing and retaining our current nursing talents through attractive scholarships, allowances, bonuses and even subsidized accommodation,” shares Cheah. “The ecosystem is so fantastic.”

Those synergies go beyond talent. CGS International’s Chong says the group has the ability to combine its healthcare offerings with other businesses like retail, hotels and theme parks. For instance, Sunway offers competitively priced medical tourism packages that include airport pick-ups, two-night hotel stays, medical screenings and day trips to the malls. “It’s that kind of a [value] proposition that will attract,” Chong says.

Through the Years

Sunway Healthcare started 25 years ago. Here’s a quick look at its journey.

Through his private philanthropy, Cheah has also built alliances around the world with top universities including Harvard and the University of Cambridge. One notable example is his £22 million ($28 million) donation to help build a new biomedical facility—bearing his name—in the heart of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus that opened in 2019. It is involved in research on stem cells, therapeutic immunology and infectious diseases. More importantly, the partnership has enabled faculty and doctors at Sunway University and his flagship hospital to collaborate on research and clinical trials in Malaysia on diseases that particularly affect Asians. “I set very high standards,” says Cheah. “I want our institution one day to be the Harvard of the East or Cambridge of the East.” Cheah has given away 670 million ringgit in educational scholarships and grants. “I strongly believe that for a poor family in a kampong, if I can educate one of their sons or daughters, then he or she will bring the whole family up.”

Cheah gets visibly excited talking about his third township Sunway City Iskandar Puteri. “I saw that potential over 10 years ago,” he says, speaking of the time the group scooped up 730 hectares only five minutes away from the Singapore border in Tuas, double the size of his original township. The project is only 30% completed, stalled by a number of factors: a housing glut and, of course, the global pandemic. But Cheah is confident. A rapid transit system between Singapore and Johor is expected to start operating by the end of 2026 and a planned Singapore-Johor Special Economic Zone will be a boon to the township.” Hopefully in one or two years’ time,” he predicts, all you will need to cross the border “will be a QR code” instead of a passport.

In fact, the original Sunway City Kuala Lumpur is only now being completed five decades on. Cheah expects his children to see Sunway City Iskandar Puteri through to completion and fulfill his vision for the group’s healthcare business. “We are very conscious of succession planning,” he says. “It is only right that we leave a good legacy, strong management, strong succession and people in place.” Over the decades, he has assembled a capable team, led by group president and board member Chew Chee Kin, who has been at Sunway since 1981. Another Sunway board member, Rebecca Fatima Sta Maria, is executive director of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat, was on Forbes’ most recent 50 Over 50 list for Asia.

Analysts are bullish on Sunway’s healthcare push.

Cheah and his wife Susan have three children, all of whom joined the family business. Their eldest daughter, Sarena, 49, sits on the board and drives the property development unit, including overseeing the Iskandar Puteri project, while the youngest, 30-year-old Adrian, heads up business development at listed Sunway REIT. Middle child Evan, 44, group CEO for digital and strategic investments, will eventually take over his role, Cheah says by WhatsApp: “Evan has been groomed to succeed me as chairman of Sunway Group when I step down in the near future.”

As kids, he dragged them around building sites to see firsthand how creating ecosystems requires a boss who is everywhere all at once. “Every inch of the land,” he recalls. “Walking in the hot sunlight? Not easy,” but necessary because they would follow in his footsteps. “In the sun or the rain,” Cheah says, “you have to be there to make things happen.”

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