They say you will never get rich working for someone else.

They are wrong.

Take Kelington Group Berhad, a BMQ50 constituent, which launched in 1999 as an engineering contractor building ultra-high purity gas and chemical delivery systems.

In the beginning, they supplied these turnkey delivery systems strictly to the semiconductor industry.

They became so exceptionally good at their craft that international clients soon came knocking.

What started in Malaysia quickly expanded to China, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

From there, they aggressively diversified their expertise into energy, glass, solar panels, palm oil refineries, and pharmaceuticals.

But at their core, they were still an engineering contractor, bound by the feast-or-famine cycle of one-off, project-based revenue.

That changed in July 2016, when they officially launched their Industrial Gases division by acquiring a 90% equity interest in Ace Gases Sdn Bhd.

Here was a company that cut its teeth building complex gas infrastructure, eventually realising its services were essential to manufacturing hubs across the globe.

Once a facility was built, Kelington shrewdly locked in multi-year maintenance contracts; after all, the engineers who built the system knew best how to keep it running.

This became their first reliable taste of recurring income.

When the opportunity arose to secure even more recurring revenue—this time with significantly higher profit margins—they seized it. Management astutely identified a lucrative market gap: crucial industrial gases like liquid carbon dioxide were in high demand across multiple sectors, yet severely undersupplied both in Malaysia and abroad.

But luck is simply what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Kelington’s true masterstroke was maintaining its core talent over the decades, retaining its best minds through highly lucrative employee share options.

The founders understood that the smartest way to scale was to share the wealth with their people.

Consider just one example.

Through the company’s Employee Share Option Scheme (ESOS), Independent Director Soo Yuit Weng accumulated options to buy shares at heavily discounted exercise prices like RM0.34, RM0.26, and RM0.255; later, under the Employee Share Scheme (ESS), shares were awarded entirely for free.

While actively building his 835,166-share position between 2013 and 2020, Kelington’s stock languished below RM1.00.

Therefore, at the time he reached this milestone holding in 2020, the entire block had an estimated market value of roughly RM300,000 to RM600,000.

Then came the July 2021 1-for-1 Bonus Issue. This meant his 835,166 shares automatically doubled to 1,670,332 shares; at the 2026 peak of RM7.96 per share, that original stake ballooned to a staggering RM13.29 million. Soo brought invaluable corporate oversight to the boardroom, serving as a Senior Independent Non-Executive Director and the Chairman of the Audit Committee.

In 2024, he officially resigned from the company, stepping away after a highly lucrative tenure.

In 2022, Kelington rolled out its latest Employee Share Scheme (ESS), extending the wealth-building program until July 5, 2032, with all confirmed, regular full-time employees eligible to participate.

It is common to find a company claiming their most important asset is their people, but few will really act with the purse string.

So, if you are a graduate entering the workforce, you might want to pay close attention the next time a vacancy opens at Kelington Group Berhad.