10/07/2016 14:01 AST
Entrepreneur Gregor Gregersen has lived all over the world after leaving his native Germany, including in Italy, England and the United States, but he now calls Singapore home, thanks to inspiration from former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
Mr Gregersen, 40, first arrived in early 2008, feeling restricted in Europe and seeking a business-friendly environment that encouraged entrepreneurship. "After two trips backpacking around the world, I moved to Singapore, the most entrepreneur-friendly country I could find."
He had chanced upon Mr Lee's book From Third World To First: The Singapore Story and was so inspired he decided to move here.
"While flying from Europe to Singapore in 2007 for a business trip, I read Mr Lee Kuan Yew's book. Mr Lee's vision for Singapore made a lot of sense to me and I started to plan to move to Singapore.
"Reading the book allowed me to understand how well Singapore was governed. I was so fascinated with Singapore that I did research on the country and compiled it into a PowerPoint presentation to share with my German friends and colleagues."
Eight months after reading the book, he found a job with a German company that allowed him to work from Singapore.
He would later join Commerzbank - as a data architect building compliance and other financial systems - where he worked from mid-2008 until 2011.
During his stint, Mr Gregersen, who holds degrees in finance and information and decision systems, returned to Germany for a while and it was there that he saw the Lehman crisis in 2008 unfurl.
"I was working in Frankfurt, in the trading room, when the crisis happened. I saw first-hand how fragile the financial system was, and there was no trust in handling money.
"You could see a lot of people were buying physical gold and silver, but by the time I decided to buy a bit of silver, it was too late because it was sold out."
He visited 12 different stores in Frankfurt before finding silver in the gift shop of the European Central Bank. The difficulty he went through led him to the idea of selling physical silver.
"Silver was more attractive to me. People always talk about gold, but if everybody wants to buy gold, it means it's quite high. Now the one ounce of gold can buy you 75 ounces of silver, and silver has started to be used in a lot of electronics."
In his early days here, he also realised that there was no bullion dealer to buy investment-grade silver from in the Republic.
When Mr Gregersen got his Singapore permanent resident status in early 2009, he decided to start his own bullion dealership.
"Silver Bullion was started with $80,000 of my savings in April 2009 in my bedroom.
"I wanted to test the local markets on the reception for silver and have some revenue before committing to fixed expenses of a rented office. I would buy silver coins and bars and transact with local buyers at MRT stations."
The firm now has its own 9,500 sq ft precious metals vault called The Safe House, deemed one of the two world-class vaults in Singapore by IE Singapore.
Mr Gregersen said: "I'm proud that seven years later, as of early 2016, we had over $330 million worth of sales and have delivered over 6.5 million troy ounces (about 200 tonnes) of silver and gold in Singapore."
The firm set up a gold- and silver- backed P2P (peer to peer) lending platform in August last year that allows borrowers to unlock capital from the precious metals stored with the firm.
The platform has now facilitated more than $10 million, across more than 300 successfully matched loans.
Mr Gregersen, who has an 11-month-old daughter named Daenerys with his wife Michelle, 29, says he is now more focused on his business rather than on active trading. "I used to be passionate about high finance and even worked at a bank structure product desk programming custom derivatives with 'quants' - those with math PhDs.
Strait Times
Please wait...
