Goh Cheng is a Singaporean billionaire businessman who founded Wuthelam Holdings, which manufactures coating and paint.
He set up his first paint store in Singapore in 1955 and have become the main distributor for Nippon Paint in 1962. Wuthelam Holdings, which now has interests withinside the paint business enterprise and property development, was based in 1974 as an estate concern.
He lives in Singapore. His Goh Foundation has made huge donations to several charitable causes.
He has a son, Goh Hup Jin, who has been the chairman of Nippon Paint and runs their privately held joint venture, Nipsea.
Goh Cheng was born in 1928, spent the first 12 years of his life in a shophouse on River Valley Road, squeezing into a $3-a-month rented room with six others - his mother and father, a brother and 3 sisters.
When World War II broke out, his mother and father sent him to Muar in Malaya. There he helped his brother-in-law promote fishing nets before returning to Singapore in 1943.
"Goh Cheng has a nose for a good deal," Mr Sim Lai Hee, a business enterprise friend and partner, once told the Business Times in 1997.
This business enterprise acumen was honed over many years.
Upon returning to Singapore, he started a business enterprise promoting aerated water. It failed, and he went directly to work at a hardware store for four-and-a-half years.
