If you live in Singapore, you have almost certainly walked through a Sheng Siong store. There are eighty-seven of them on the island, anchoring Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates and neighbourhood malls from Yishun in the north to Pasir Ris in the east. The company’s tagline, “Always By Your Side”, captures the philosophy in three words: be the trusted neighbourhood store that ordinary Singaporean households can rely on for daily essentials, week after week.
The company name itself tells part of the story. In Chinese characters, Sheng Siong is written 昇菘, where 昇 (sheng) carries the sense of “to rise” or “to prosper” in Mandarin, and 菘 (siong) is a classical name for the Chinese leafy-green vegetable family that includes bok choy and Chinese cabbage. It is a fitting label for a chain whose founding identity was anchored in fresh produce. Founders Lim Hock Eng, Lim Hock Chee and Lim Hock Leng started the business in 1985, after working in their family’s hog-rearing trade [13], and over forty years built it into a chain whose stated mission has not really shifted: deliver value-for-money daily essentials to heartland families, especially residents of HDB estates, with quality products at competitive prices.
What most people have not done is looked at the company itself as an investment. Sheng Siong Group Ltd. (Singapore Exchange ticker: OV8) is today the third-largest supermarket chain in Singapore, listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) Mainboard in August 2011. In its FY2025 financial year ended 31 December 2025, the Group generated S$1.57 billion in revenue and S$149.2 million in net profit, finished the year with S$435.5 million in cash and zero conventional debt, and paid 7.0 cents per share in dividends, a fresh record.
At the share price of roughly S$3.08 in late April 2026, the company carried a market capitalisation of approximately S$4.0 billion [1], placing it just inside Singapore’s mid-cap index neighbourhood. The numbers behind that headline are quietly extraordinary. The story behind those numbers, and whether that story is already fully discounted, is what this article tries to unpack.
