SINGAPORE: Chatri Sityodtong, chairman and CEO of ONE Championship, has asserted that the martial arts promotion he founded is on track to achieve the $1 billion valuation milestone within this calendar year.
Sityodtong made his comments while delivering a keynote here Tuesday at Sportel Singapore under the topic: “How ONE Championship became Asia’s largest global sports media property in History”.
In the course of his presentation, Sityodtong detailed how he escaped the clutches of extreme poverty growing up as a young boy in Thailand, to graduating from Harvard, and eventually building the ONE Championship.
Pertinently, it was earlier Tuesday that ONE Championship announced that Saurabh Mittal, founder and chairman of Mission Holdings, had joined in a direct executive capacity as vice-chairman “responsible for some of the most important strategic initiatives at Asia’s largest martial arts promotion”.
Mittal happens to be Sityodtong’s batchmate from Harvard and his “best friend” as well, the entrepreneur who has himself practiced martial arts for most of his life,
revealed.
Additionally, it was in July last year that the Singapore-based sports media brand secured a major equity investment led by venture capital firm Sequoia India and Mission Holdings, bringing its total funding raised to over $100 million. ONE Championship also counts Singapore’s state investment firm Temasek, via its subsidiary Heliconia Capital, among its shareholders.
In its seventh year as an enterprise, ONE Championship is still in investment mode and Sityodtong refuses to discuss what ONE’s operational break-even horizon is, remaining focused on metrics – social media impressions, video views, TV ratings, broadcast hours per country per year, all of which have been growing exponentially.
Sityodtong hopes to take the company public some time in the next three years and has in his “distant” sights the NFL’s $75 billion valuation as the ultimate goal.
What will take ONE there? Asia’s population of 4.4 billion and its 5,000-year-old tradition and history as the home of martial arts, is Sityodtong’s passionate conviction.
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