All the World’s a Stage

GGU The Magazine of Golden Gate University

The Sansrkit word mayapada means “galaxy” or “universe.” And the Mayapada Group, an Indonesia-based corporation founded by Mr. Tahir (MBA 88), has grown exponentially. Launched as a garment business in 1986, it has expanded into the realms of finance, retail, healthcare, property and media. One of the Group’s main business arms, Bank Mayapada, is now the fourth-largest privately owned bank in Indonesia, with 150 branches all over the country. The bank not only weathered the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global economic crisis, but actually flourished. And as Tahir has built success upon success in his diverse ventures, he has become widely recognized as a dedicated philanthropist, donating millions to educational and other causes.

Born in 1952 in Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia at the time, to poor, hard-working parents, Tahir couldn’t have been further removed from his current life of multimillion-dollar deals and finance magazine cover stories. To support Tahir and his two younger sisters, his mother leased a pedicab and later became a diamond dealer, while his father ran a fabric shop with his sister. Not until Tahir was 20 could his family finally afford to buy a house, after leasing with another family throughout his childhood. “As a child I didn’t have any special visions or ideas that ‘I want to be somebody,’” he explains. What first drove him toward success in business was basic necessity: “Because I come from a poor family, it was clear that I would have to work hard to support my family.”

If you take a risk that you can afford, it’s called an investment.

After graduating from high school at age 16, Tahir was admitted to medical school in Taiwan, but he dropped out shortly after due to his father’s ill health and enrolled at Nan Yang University in Singapore. In his third year of college, he started a retail and wholesale grocery business, continuing to work after he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1976. Groceries appealed to him because “they are consumer goods, and fast-moving.” He traded and imported popular brands of products such as candy, cookies, and beer from China, Japan, and Taiwan, opening a store called Riadi Utama. He met his wife, Rosy Riady, through matchmaking — “To the western world it’s unbelievable, but according to research, sometimes matchmaking is more successful”— and the pair were married in 1974. They have four children — three daughters and a son in their 30s — and eight grandchildren.

“After marriage, basically the first step is how to feed my children, how to support the family — it’s very simple,” asserts Tahir. “Whatever the job, I work diligently; I work just to try to earn some money to make a living, to survive.” He launched a car sales business in Jakarta that “did okay” for a while, but finally went under in the late ’80s, and it took him some time to recover financially. But he feels that without this failure, he wouldn’t have become the businessman that he is. “From 1988 up to 1991, that was the most difficult time of my life. But I was so lucky because of that experience. I now understood a few principles of life. First of all, don’t go for too much leverage, don’t overborrow the bank. Second, you have to have some control over your own operation. So this kind of experience really made my portfolio richer. It was very useful for later things.”