The door chimes softly. A customer walks into ValueMax carrying a Patek Philippe watch. Twenty minutes later, they're walking out with $50,000 (S$68,000) cash.

No questions about why they need it. No judgment about their situation. Just a fair valuation and a six-month ticket to reclaim their treasure.

This happens on the regular across ValueMax's nearly 70 outlets in Singapore and Malaysia. Not just with luxury watches but with wedding rings, gold bangles passed down through generations, and even Hermès bags.

But this isn't your grandfather's pawnshop experience.

Yeah Hiang Nam transformed pawnbroking from society's last resort into something else entirely. A financial tool that felt respectable. Almost like a bank loan, but faster. And without all the paperwork.

From his first pawnshop in 1988, Yeah built ValueMax into 47 Singapore outlets and over 20 Malaysian locations and nearly 500 employees.

It is listed on the Singapore stock exchange (SGX) Mainboard and is still growing today, with the first half of 2025 alone delivering $197M (S$268.3M) in revenue.

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💥 School’s out

Born in Penang, Malaysia, Yeah Hiang Nam started learning to be an entrepreneur at age four. But it wasn’t by choice.

While other kids were sleeping, little Yeah was on the streets selling Malay delicacies (kueh) to help his family survive.

Every morning, he’d wake up in the wee hours, load up the kueh, walk the streets, count the coins, then somehow make it to school.

School was where things got complicated.

Yeah was actually consistently ranking among the top students. But life doesn't care about your report card or achievements.

When he was forced to drop out at about 14 even if he was a good student, the message was brutal but clear: intelligence without capital meant nothing at the time. He couldn’t afford to stay in school.

That lesson would shape everything.

At seventeen, Yeah made the move that changed everything for ambitious small-town kids of the time: he left for more opportunity overseas. For him, this was Singapore.

He found work as an office boy in a Chinese medicine hall. It wasn’t glamorous work, but Singapore in the 1960s was transforming from a trading post to a powerhouse, and Yeah could feel it.

He was going to transform along with it.

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✨ When gold became everything

Then came 1969. A friend's referral landed Yeah a job at a jewelry store, and suddenly, everything clicked for him.

For the next decade, Yeah didn't just learn about gold. He learned to spot quality.

The difference between 916 gold (22 karats, that deep yellow of quality) and 999 gold (pure, soft? Why certain designs made customers stop and take a look while others collected dust? He knew.

He saw how trust was built, one transaction at a time, and the psychology of luxury too.

And more than that, Yeah understood that in Asian culture, gold isn't just wealth.

It represented security, love, legacy. It was everything, wrapped in something—gold bars, gold jewelry—that you can hold.

And along with all this expertise, he also built confidence in himself.

By 1980, he faced a question anyone working for others faces. Was it time to take a leap and bet on myself?

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🏭 The $10,000 gamble

After 10 years of working for others, Yeah was ready.

The gamble was $7,400 (S$10,000) borrowed to start Golden Goldsmith Jewellers in 1979. If he failed, he'd be worse than broke. He'd be in debt with nothing to show for it.

His strategy was radical simplicity.

While competitors maintained 40% margins selling to the wealthy, Yeah would accept 15% margins and sell to everyone else. High volume, low margins, quality you could see in the weight and gleam of every piece.

While competitors chased fat profits on fewer sales, Yeah flooded the market with affordable luxury.

And it worked. For five beautiful years, their factory was humming with tons of orders.

Until it stopped.

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💥 The crisis that changed everything

1984 hit like a sledgehammer.

Singapore's economy tanked. Jewelry, the ultimate "nice to have" purchase, simply stopped selling. Yeah's bustling factory went dead silent, and workers waited for wages that might not come.

Yeah could have filed for bankruptcy and moved on.

But instead, he looked at a map and had a crazy idea: The Middle East was swimming in oil money. They loved gold.

Sure, he barely spoke English and zero Arabic, but so what?

Turns out, gold needed no translation.

Yeah flew to Dubai with sample cases and pure determination. He navigated with gestures and broken English, but his approach resonated immediately. Honest prices, quality goods, no games.

Orders flooded in, and the factory roared back to life.

But when Middle Eastern governments cranked up import duties to crushing levels, Yeah didn't panic.

He pivoted to Hong Kong. For ten years, he held his own in Asia's most sophisticated gold market. Until other manufacturers started undercutting everyone with prices that felt insane to match.

By the late 1980s, Yeah was back at square one after twenty years in jewelry.

That's when he noticed something nobody else did.

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🏦 The shame business nobody wanted

In 1988, Yeah opened his first pawnshop.

To understand why this was revolutionary, you need to picture what Singapore pawnshops looked like back then:

Dingy rooms with barred windows that looked more like jail cells and lighting so dim you could barely see what you were pawning.

Counters were high that forced customers to literally look up at the pawnbroker, which was a physical reminder of who had the power.

These places felt shameful and desperate. But not to Yeah.

He saw housewives with gold jewelry worth thousands sitting uselessly in drawers. Small business owners who needed two weeks of cash flow, not a two-year bank loan. Retirees sitting on assets but living cash-poor.

He saw them all as people with temporary liquidity needs, so why should accessing that liquidity feel like admitting defeat?

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✨ The sixteen-year overnight success

16 years after opening his first pawnshop, he finally launched the ValueMax pawnshop brand, consolidating six existing pawnshops under one identity.

"The traditional pawn shops were poorly run, they were typically very badly lit and not inviting for customers," Yeah recalled. "We changed our environment with very bright lighting and created an inviting retail space."

But lighting was just the start. Staff wore professional attire instead of tank tops and shorts, and valuation became transparent.

Customers could actually watch the process. Interest rates simplified to 1% for the first month, 1.5% thereafter. Yup, there were no more confusing sliding scales.

On top of all that, customers could renew or redeem loans at any ValueMax outlet across Singapore.

Yeah wasn't done. He added retail operations, refurbishing unredeemed items and selling them at competitive prices. That Rolex someone couldn't reclaim? Someone else's dream watch at 60% of retail. Those old gold bangles? Perfect for young people who wanted their first few pieces of jewelry.

"That's one of the virtues of the second-hand market," Yeah explained. "Everything's getting a second chance."

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📈 Going public while staying family

On October 30, 2013, Yeah Hiang Nam, the boy who couldn't afford to continue school, rang the opening bell at the Singapore Exchange.

ValueMax became the first pawnshop chain listed on the Mainboard. The IPO raised $48.7M (S$66.3M) and was oversubscribed 6.3 times.

At $221M (S$301.4M) market cap, ValueMax dwarfed the competition.

But this goes beyond just “who built a biggest pawnshop business” listing on Singapore’s stock exchange legitimized an entire industry.

Suddenly, pawnbroking wasn't a back-alley business. It was a legitimate financial service. ValueMax expanded into property financing, accepting private residences at 60% loan-to-value, broader moneylending, and institutional gold trading.

Then COVID hit, and everyone expected pawnshops to boom as desperate people pawned their valuables.

"We were prepared for pawnbroking services to increase," Yeah noted, "but what happened instead was that both loan redemptions and jewellery sales went up."

People had cash. They wanted to invest in tangible assets, and gold was perfect.

The result? "We didn't have to retrench a single worker or reduce any salaries." While others panicked, ValueMax kept opening stores. Two to three annually, even during the pandemic.

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👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Gold blocks and family bonds

It’s still a family business today. And it always was. While other kids played with plastic Lego blocks,  Yeah’s daughter, Yeah Lee Ching was in her father's home workshop stacking actual gold bars like they were toys.

"I'd also help out after school, like knocking in the '916' stamp on the ornaments," she recalls. "It was fun."

She's now Managing Director, overseeing retail and trading operations. Her brother Yeah Chia Kai brings a different energy as CEO. After joining ValueMax in 2004, he actually left to found a software company called Mischief Studios. Then came back in 2007 with fresh ideas about digital transformation.

And here's Yeah's rule about family businesses: Keep it in the family, but "that does not include in-laws." And it’s worked for them.

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🏆 More than money

In 2016, Singapore's President awarded him the Public Service Medal. But government recognition meant something different. It acknowledged that ValueMax had transformed how Singapore thinks about financial access.

His business philosophy hasn't changed since 1979: High volume. Low margins. Treat everyone with dignity. Remember that trust compounds faster than interest.

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🌏 Here and now

Today, ValueMax commands an empire that would seem impossible for that four-year-old selling pastries in Penang.

The first half of 2025 alone delivered $197M (S$268.3M) in revenue, a 16.8% jump from the previous year. Net profit surged 35.7% to $35.8M (S$48.8M).

At this pace, the company is heading toward $390M (S$540M) in annual revenue, a huge leap from the $335M (S$456.2M) recorded in 2024.

But these numbers only tell part of the story. What Yeah Hiang Nam really built was a bridge between shame and dignity, desperation and opportunity, and old stigmas and new ways to reframe them.

He turned dingy shops that reeked of shame to bright stores where accessing liquidity feels as normal as visiting a bank.

But this isn’t a story of modernizing pawnbroking. It’s a story of how he transformed an industry by serving the same human needs people have had for years—except he served them with dignity.

And he didn’t need to go to school or work at a big-name company to get this insight.

People don't want charity or judgement. They want fair value and respect. And oftentimes, that's worth more than gold.