After a China retreat, Singapore's Select Group expanded Southeast Asia properly

Singapore food-and-beverage operator: institutional catering, restaurant chains including Peach Garden, Hong Kong Sheng Kee Dessert, Pho Street and Hill Street Coffee Shop, and ready-to-eat meals.

That casual-dining brands, adapted to local dining habits and researched before entry, could win Southeast Asia where an unadapted China canteen venture had failed.

Founded by Vincent Tan in 1991. In 2005, riding its Singapore institutional-catering success, Select expanded into staff canteens in China — and beat a painful retreat just four years in, learning the model did not translate across cultures.

The second attempt inverted the method: with IE Singapore and later Enterprise Singapore providing market studies, regulatory guidance and JV introductions, Select entered Malaysia in 2015, then Indonesia and Vietnam, sending a Singapore team to set up and stabilise operations while building local teams. Adaptation became policy — Hill Street Coffee Shop added whole Hainanese chicken and shareable stir-fries after finding Vietnamese consumers dine family-style. Next targets: Penang, Melaka, Medan, Surabaya, Hanoi, then Thailand and the Philippines, with Tan foreseeing Southeast Asia possibly surpassing the home market.

The China failure produced a playbook: research first, government-agency support, local knowledge on the ground.

Multi-brand casual dining gave each market several shots on goal instead of one institutional contract model.

Menu adaptation (shared whole dishes in Vietnam) treated cultural difference as product input, not friction.

A failed first expansion is only wasted if it isn't autopsied: the second attempt changed the concept, added months of pre-entry research, and built local teams over fly-in management.

As of 12 November 2018 the group was scaling across three Southeast Asian hubs with four more cities and two more countries planned; Tan said Southeast Asia could in the long term surpass Singapore's contribution.