Day: February 19, 2025

M’sian coffee giant ZUS Coffee launches luxe signature store concept in 2 locations

Ever since its inception in late 2019, ZUS Coffee has become a staple in Malaysia.

I remember walking by their first outlet in Binjai 8 that year, and was surprised when I began seeing them practically everywhere I went after the Covid lockdowns had eased up.

The company currently boasts 610 stores across the country according to their website.

And now, they’ve got another in Taman Paramount under their new label, ZUS Signature.

With a luxurious edge, this concept is an elevation of their usual convenience and affordability-driven model.

Editor’s Update [20/02/2025, 9.40AM]: The above paragraph has been edited to reflect greater accuracy of statement.

“Where Necessity Meets Luxury”

The new ZUS Signature store will reinforce the company’s presence in the specialty coffee market.

Exclusive to outlets under this brand will be Single Origin Espressos (SOEs) from Brazil and Ethiopia. These will be prepared using the Victoria Arduino Eagle One, which saw usage in the World Latte Art Competition.

Other menu highlights include the Zeriously Matcha Latte and Yuzu Thunder, two new items crafted in conjunction with the store’s opening.

Not to draw comparisons, but it feels like ZUS Signature may have been inspired by the concept behind Starbucks Reserve, albeit with their own spin on things.

“At ZUS Coffee, we believe that great coffee is a necessity, not a luxury,” shared Head of Coffee and Zuristas Terence Ho.

“Now, ZUS Signature is where a necessity meets luxury—a space where coffee connoisseurs can experience the highest level of craftsmanship, from the finest beans to innovative flavours that push the boundaries of specialty coffee culture.”

Long-time customers of ZUS will also be glad to know that items such as the CEO Latte, Spanish Latte, and Gula Melaka Latte will also be on offer at ZUS Signature stores.

Another ZUS Signature store can be found in The Oasis, Sunway Pyramid.

Deliveries and order pick-ups for both outlets can be made through the ZUS Coffee app.

Staying on their toes

The reason behind ZUS Coffee’s creation was to fill the gap in the market for “good quality coffee at an affordable price.”

Those were the words of COO Venon Tian during a panel at the Tech in Asia Conference 2024.

But that said, he also emphasised how crucial it is for businesses to adapt in the face of changing market conditions.

This is shown in them adapting to the rising costs of coffee beans and cocoa recently.

ZUS Signature could be part of that strategy to match fan expectations.

• Learn more about ZUS Coffee here.
• Read other articles we’ve written about F&B businesses here.

Also Read: CARiNG’s CNY video reminds us what “home” really means, and it’s not about a place

Featured Image Credit: ZUS Coffee

Singapore-based GCL Global Holdings emerges as a top gainer on NASDAQ

Singapore-headquartered GCL Global Holdings has emerged as a top gainer on NASDAQ following the successful completion of its merger with SPAC firm RF Acquisition.

The company, which is also the parent holding group of a few other Singaporean companies including YouTuber Jianhao Tan’s Titan Digital Media, saw its shares skyrocket 145.97% to US$7.50 today (February 19) amid strong market momentum.

This surge comes shortly after GCL Global Holdings released its latest financials, reporting a narrower net loss for the first half of the 2025 fiscal year, driven by higher revenues from console games and game code sales.

For the six-month period to September 30, 2024, GCL Global Holdings reported a net loss of US$512,287 (US$0.02 per share)—a significant improvement from the US$1.530 million loss (US$0.06 per share) recorded in the same period last year.

GCL Global Holdings produces and distributes video games across seven countries, and has forged more than 15 multi-year deals with big-name publishers such as TAKE-TWO, CD Projekt Red, Warner Bros. Games, SEGA, and Bandai Namco. 

The group is responsible for bringing some award-winning favourites to Singapore, including Hogwarts Legacy, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption II, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Elden Ring.

Most recently, the company has announced the acquisition of 20% equity interests of video game developer NEKCOM Inc., along with the global publishing rights of the latter’s upcoming game, Showa American Story.

As a Singaporean company listed in the US, GCL Global Holdings is one to watch, joining other prominent Singaporean firms, including Grab, MoneyHero Group and Ryde, in the global market spotlight.

Grab and MoneyHero Group began trading on NASDAQ after completing SPAC deals—Grab in 2021 and MoneyHero Group in 2023—while RYDE made its debut on the NYSE last year. 

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Also Read: Titan Digital Media’s parent company GCL goes public on NASDAQ

Featured Image Credit: Titan Digital Media via Facebook

Can AI make mobile gaming more fun? The ASUS ROG Phone 9 gave me my answer.

If a flagship phone has been released in the past year, you can bet that it’s got some AI feature or the other.

Whether it’s for transcription, translation, better note-taking, and more, AI has infiltrated a lot of our phone’s software. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a little… boring. Predictable, even.

But what does AI in a gaming phone look like?

I got my answer with the ASUS ROG Phone 9.

We out here g-AI-ming

As a gaming phone, of course the priority would be the use of AI in enhancing the gaming experience. 

Admittedly, a lot of it is in the beta mode still, but it already seems promising. 

There were a few title games highlighted by ASUS that could benefit from their new AI gaming features: Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Arena of Valor, MLBB, and League of Legends: Wild Rift.

I’ll be focusing on the one that I am most familiar with, Genshin Impact.

For the former, I played around with these features:

1. Auto Pick Up 

When activated, walking near collectibles would automatically pick them up without you pressing anything—in theory. 

For the most part, it worked, but sometimes would be a hit or miss. If I maybe ran too fast past an item, or if they were in clusters, I noticed that the feature would miss picking up a few things.

Great for some lazy, idle gaming when you’re running around the map anyway, but hardcore farmers might end up more frustrated than pleased with this feature.

2. Auto Run

By automatically pressing the “up” button for you, this is another feature that I feel is great for those exploring the map.

You still have to control which direction your character goes, but at least you don’t need to keep your finger on the screen the entire time and risk cramping it.

3. X Sense – Speed up conversations

For those who hate Genshin Impact’s yap sessions, this would be a half-win. It allows you to move through multiple dialogue lines automatically, but it doesn’t exactly allow you to skip dialogue per se, a la Wuthering Waves. 

You still need to give the dialogue lines time to finish, and the AI cannot help you select a response when needed, so you still have to take action at times.

4. Quick Escape

Okay, this one’s a legit lifesaver for one of the game’s most annoying mechanics, getting caught in a Hydro bubble or getting frozen, and I can confirm, it works very well.

Enhancing d-AI-ly use

Still in the realm of gaming, another AI feature that’s pretty cool is X Capture, which automatically records your gatcha sessions on Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, while recording kills, victories, or even defeated moments on games like Arena of Valor and MLBB.

In Arena of Valor, MLBB, and League of Legends: Wild Rift, the ROG Phone 9 has an Auto Skill Upgrade which detects when your character gets a new skill, and maps it to the appropriate skill buttons so you don’t have to fiddle with settings. 

Available across all games, the AI Grabber feature could come in handy when you’re stuck in a game and unsure of how to progress or don’t understand the game’s objectives. 

Just select any text on the screen that you want to copy, and AI Grabber will seamlessly pull it up on Google without needing you to type anything.

It also has a translation feature, which makes chatting with foreign players much easier.

Gaming aside, there are what ASUS calls daily AI features too, to enhance your experience using the ROG Phone 9 as a daily driver.

This includes:

• AI Call Translator, which supports English, Chinese, Cantonese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish
• AI Transcript in the Recorder app, which needs no internet connection to work and can generate summarised notes from the text of your recording
• Circle to Search (this will only be added in Q4 through a system update), which I am very excited about because it’s been a true quality-of-life (QOL) upgrade on my own phone

Powering all these AI features and more is a 5,800mAh battery and a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, and the phone’s capabilities are enjoyed through a 6.78” AMOLED display with up to a 185Hz refresh rate.

Here are some of the phone’s other specs:

I wouldn’t say that the ROG Phone 9 is a device geared for work productivity or mobile photography, but you’d probably be able to get decent performance for both out of it anyway.

On the topic of photography, the AirTrigger buttons provide users with another easier way of snapping a photo, and there’s the 6-Axis Hybrid Gimbal Stabilizer 4.0 which is supposed to provide more stability for smoother videos and pictures.

I do find the latter to be a bit overdone, as the movement delay caused by the stabiliser tends to throw me off. If you’re someone who usually has shaky hands though, this would definitely balance things out.

Its 5,800mAh battery is an upgrade from the previous generation’s 5,500mAh capacity, and as long as you’re not doing high-intensity gaming for long stretches of time, battery life shouldn’t be an issue.

Verdict

The gaming AI features on the ROG Phone 9 are a breath of fresh air to explore, but to answer the big question: Did they make gaming more fun?

Somewhat. By cutting out repetitive or disruptive actions in gameplay, they enable you to focus more on the fun parts, be it the exploration or battles, and to some, that equals more fun. If I was still gaming as much as I was about a year ago, these features would probably quite literally be gamechangers to me.

To add, these features are all still in beta, which means there’s more room for improvement, and I’m interested to see how far the AI gaming tech can go.

Give me AI-enhanced QOL features any day, but I hope it doesn’t get to the point whereby the AI just outright plays the game for you, because what would be the fun in that?

The ROG Phone 9 is available at a starting price of RM3,999.

• Learn more about the ASUS ROG Phone 9 here.
• Read other VP Verdicts we’ve written here.

VP Verdict is a series where we personally try and test out products, services, fads, and apps. Want to suggest something else for us to try? Leave a comment here or send the suggestion to our Facebook page!

Also Read: Bigger is always better for displays, but size isn’t the only reason we like these 98″ TCL TVs

At 23, he coded a startup in his bedroom. Now, his M’sian HR firm serves 450+ global clients.

[This is a sponsored article with Great Pyramid.]

Tejvinder Singh, co-founder and CEO of Great Pyramid, has always been a bit of a rebel. A bright student early on, scoring well in UPSR and PMR, his academic success didn’t quite carry through to SPM, where he only secured one A. 

But that was never the end goal for him anyway. “Right after secondary school, I just wanted to work and earn my own income. Money was my main driver. I wanted to be the next Bill Gates, hence why I studied IT,” Tejvinder shared with Vulcan Post. 

His early ventures were a mix of freelance gigs as a promoter and usherer, along with attempts to sell products like perfumes and clothes online. While these efforts were not successful, he views them as valuable learning experiences.

A key learning he picked up from those failed ventures was that market research is everything. “I assumed demand existed and expected success without real data. I quickly realised intuition alone wasn’t enough. Taking calculated risks based on market insights is far more effective,” he said.

One way he turned his lesson into action was by starting Great Pyramid. 

Building from the ground up

Great Pyramid began as an immigration and mobility services provider, catering to companies that hired expatriates in Malaysia. 

While still in university, Tejvinder gained hands-on experience in this field by handling data entry and manually submitting expatriate pass applications to authorities. That’s when he noticed a gap in the industry’s understanding of regulatory requirements and saw an opportunity to bridge it. 

In the early days, he handled everything himself—from meeting clients to liaising with authorities—all from a small room at home equipped with just a PC, phone, and fax machine.

His knowledge grew through extensive research and a relentless drive to ask the right questions.

A turning point came when HR departments of client companies began inquiring about additional HR services like recruitment and payroll. 

“That was the ‘lightbulb moment.’ We already had a good reputation and access to clients, so we expanded into recruitment, payroll outsourcing, and Employer of Record (EoR) services,” he said. “Learning new trades was tough, but I kept an inquisitive mind and asked industry experts.”

Dictionary time: EoR is an organisation that takes care of the legal and administrative duties of employing people on behalf of another business. While employees still work for their employer, the EoR manages things like contracts, taxes, and other employment-related tasks.

Source: Personio

Winning trust and scaling up

Starting a business when he was just 23 wasn’t easy. “Companies didn’t want to trust a young guy with their expatriate mobility and HR matters,” Tejvinder admitted. 

To gain credibility, he launched a website. Without a marketing budget, he relied on cold calls and email blasts, even scanning newspaper job advertisements to reach out to HR departments. 

“Our pitch was simple: we only charge on a success basis, no deposits or upfront payments. We were confident we could deliver, and as we built trust, our client base grew.” 

One of their biggest breakthroughs came in 2011 when a Fortune 500 company engaged their services. According to Tejvinder, this client remains with them to this day and has significantly contributed to their growth. 

Fast forward to today, Great Pyramid serves over 450 clients across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, India, the USA, the UK, Australia, China, Cyprus, Spain, Austria, UAE, Hong Kong, and Germany. 

Growing from a solo operation to serving global clients came with its fair share of challenges, and one of the biggest hurdles he had to face was managing a workforce.

“Being a relatively unknown brand, attracting top talents was tough. In the early days, we made hiring mistakes such as recruiting too quickly without a rigorous selection process. That led to high turnover, and I often had to step in personally to manage clients and operations,” he shared.

To fix this, they introduced structured hiring processes and invested in employer branding, along with, of course, prioritising their clients above all else. 

“I also take a hands-on approach, assisting teams with challenges and engaging directly with clients,” he added.

Becoming a one-stop HR partner

According to Tejvinder, what sets Great Pyramid apart is their hybrid approach, leveraging AI-driven solutions with a personal touch, backed by a strong regional presence and deep knowledge of local labour laws.

“Many HR platforms focus purely on automation, but businesses expanding in Southeast Asia need more than just software. They need compliance expertise and real-world workforce solutions,” said Tejvinder.

He added that global HR tech platforms offer broad solutions, but the company focuses on providing customised, country-specific services, helping businesses navigate complex regulations without the risks of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Their core services include recruitment and talent acquisition, immigration and mobility, expatriate pass applications, workforce management, and HR advisory and consultancy.

“We handle everything end-to-end, from sourcing talent and employment contracts to work pass applications,” he summed up.

One of their recent focuses has been sourcing talents for the data centre industry. “A major client was having trouble finding local talent, so we suggested bringing in foreign talents. The client was concerned about the legal aspects, but we reassured them that we’d handle all the paperwork,” he shared as an example of the challenges clients typically face.

“So far, we’ve helped mobilise over 100 expatriates for the client.”

Great Pyramid also played a pivotal role in helping a global mobility tech company scale in Southeast Asia. “They needed to hire fast but didn’t want to manage the admin side. We started with just two staff for them, and within three years, that number grew to nearly 100.”

Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a destination

Great Pyramid is now expanding its regional presence into Indonesia and Thailand, while also broadening its service offerings. The company is further enhancing its immigration and mobility services by assisting with the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme.

For context, the MM2H programme was introduced by the Malaysian government as a way for non-Malaysians to retire and live in Malaysia for an extended period of time.

Looking ahead, Great Pyramid has ambitious plans, with a roadmap in place to go public within the next five years. “The target is to list by 2029,” Tejvinder told us. 

For him, entrepreneurship is a continuous journey of learning and growth. This is because he believes success isn’t about proving anything to others, but about proving to himself that he could do it. 

Two defining moments stand out in his journey: winning The Best in Customer Service Award at the 2023 Star Outstanding Business Awards (SOBA) and being selected for the 2024 Elevate programme by the Securities Commission and Capital Markets Malaysia.  

Despite these achievements, he remains humble. “I don’t think I’ve made it yet. There’s always more to learn. That’s what keeps me going.”

• Learn more about Great Pyramid here. 
• Read other articles we’ve written about Malaysian startups here.

Also Read: Not just a fad: How this entrepreneur plans to seriously grow Malaysia’s pickleball scene

Featured Image Credit: Great Pyramid

From 10 to 0: The Manhattan Fish Market shuts down last remaining outlet in S’pore

The Manhattan Fish Market has closed its last remaining outlet in Singapore at Northpoint City.

In response to Vulcan Post’s inquiries, a customer service officer from Northpoint City confirmed the news, stating that the outlet ceased operations sometime last week. It has also been marked as ‘permanently closed’ on Google Maps.

Further checks by Vulcan Post revealed that The Manhattan Fish Market’s outlet locator page on its website displays an error once accessed, and its delivery partner, Oddle, lists all items from the Northpoint City outlet as out of stock.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the seafood chain operated 10 outlets across Singapore, including at Plaza Singapura, Suntec City, and Changi Airport. However, all outlets gradually shuttered over the years.

Vulcan Post has reached out to The Manhattan Fish Market for additional comments.

The Manhattan Fish Market was first started in Malaysia about twenty years ago, and has since expanded to countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Qatar.

The seafood chain is owned by Malaysian-based investment holding company Revenue Valley Group, which also operates several other F&B brands, including American diner chain Tony Roma’s. Tony Roma’s shuttered its only outlet in Singapore back in 2019.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Also Read: The Manhattan Fish Market is actually a Malaysian brand, here’s its 21 Y/O story

Featured Image Credit: The Manhattan Fish Market/ Vulcan Post