From Budapest to Singapore - A Life-Changing Decision
When people ask me why I moved from Budapest to Singapore, I often smile. Because the truth is: I didn’t plan it. I didn’t spend years mapping out a relocation strategy or debating pros and cons. I arrived in Singapore for the first time in September 2018, and within two weeks, I knew. This was where I wanted to build the next chapter of my life. By December, my family and I were living here.
It was a life-changing decision, both personally and professionally, but one that felt inevitable the moment I stepped into Singapore.
The Story Before the Story
To understand why Singapore had such an impact on me, you need to understand where I came from. I grew up in a small Hungarian village in a family that valued education, integrity, and discipline. At 14, I left home to study in another city. My days began at 4:30 AM with running and swimming before school. That rhythm built resilience into me at an early age.
I went on to study pharmaceutical sciences in Budapest. By my early twenties, I found myself not only immersed in medical studies but also leading student politics, holding voting power at the level of a government minister. People didn’t follow me because I spoke the most. In fact, I rarely spoke. They followed because when I did, it mattered.
That ability — to cut through noise with clarity — became central to how I operate.
I worked for global pharma companies like Pfizer, saw inefficiencies from the inside, and decided to challenge the system. In 2007, I founded CRU Hungary, the first private clinical research unit in the country. It was a radical model: embedding private research into government hospitals. We were faster, more efficient, and more patient-centered than the largest universities. We didn’t just run trials. We changed legislation. We forced regulators to adapt. We showed that clinical research could be more than bureaucracy — it could be execution.
Over the next decade, I expanded across Europe and into Vietnam. By 2020, we had built one of the most agile clinical trial networks in the region. Then COVID hit. Within a week, governments shut down my clinics. Frankfurt closed permanently. Hanoi was lost. Millions in investment vanished.
For many, that would have been the end. For me, it was a pivot point. I rebuilt my model, moving from owning infrastructure to embedding within partner hospitals. More agile, less capital-intensive, and resilient to political shocks. Around the same time, I began investing in biotech and medtech startups, launching a venture arm out of Singapore. I had shifted from operator to ecosystem builder.
And Singapore was the natural home for this evolution.
The Moment in Singapore
In 2018, I was enrolled in an international healthcare MBA at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The program was unique: a cohort of healthcare professionals from more than 20 countries traveling the world together, studying the best healthcare systems from Baltimore to Bangalore.
When we arrived in Singapore, something clicked. From the first day, I saw a country that embodied what I had always been chasing: discipline, efficiency, innovation, and ambition woven into the very fabric of society.
Coming from Central Eastern Europe, where systems were often messy and politics unpredictable, Singapore felt like a dream. The streets were clean. The public services were reliable. The schools were excellent. The government supported business not with words but with execution — through grants, incentives, and infrastructure.
Singapore wasn’t just well-run. It was visionary. It had already positioned itself as a financial hub, a logistics hub, a biotech hub, and now, increasingly, an AI hub.
Within weeks, I was visiting schools with my children. Within months, we had relocated.
Why Singapore Matters for Healthcare and Investment
For me, the move wasn’t only about quality of life. It was about positioning at the intersection of future growth. Asia is not just large; it is young, ambitious, and accelerating. The middle class is rising across Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond. Healthcare demand is expanding at a speed Europe can no longer match.
If you want to build scalable solutions in healthcare, you cannot ignore Asia.
Singapore sits at the heart of this region, yet with governance and infrastructure that match — and often exceed — Europe or the U.S. It is safe. It is trusted. It is globally connected. From Singapore, I can reach Hanoi, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney in a matter of hours. I can build partnerships across Asia while maintaining deep ties to Europe.
For investors, Singapore offers more than geography. It offers credibility. When you base a healthcare venture here, you tap into a trusted regulatory framework, a strong talent pool, and access to international capital.
This is why global pharma companies and venture capital funds increasingly look to Singapore as their Asian hub. And this is why I chose to anchor my business here.
Building After Crisis
The pandemic forced me to rethink everything. Before COVID, my model depended on owned clinics. After COVID, that model was no longer viable. Governments could take over facilities overnight. Fixed costs became liabilities.
So I pivoted. Today, instead of owning infrastructure, we partner with hospitals. We lease space, embed our teams, and retain operational control. It is faster to scale, more capital efficient, and less vulnerable to political disruption.
This shift not only saved my business — it made it stronger. It also aligned perfectly with Singapore’s ecosystem, where partnerships, adaptability, and speed are rewarded.
From here, I expanded further: launching CRU Global, building a software platform for clinical research, and investing in early-stage biotech and medtech companies across Asia and Europe.
The lesson was clear: resilience is not optional. It is the foundation of sustainable growth.
Lessons for Investors
My move to Singapore was not just personal. It reflects a larger truth for investors and operators alike:
Follow the future, not the past. Europe has world-class science, but its systems are slowing. Asia is where the patients are, where the middle class is growing, and where governments are hungry for innovation.
Execution beats vision without systems. The best science fails without operational excellence. Singapore excels at execution, and so must we.
Resilience is strategy. If your model depends on fixed assets that can be disrupted overnight, you don’t have a moat. You have a risk. Flexibility is the new moat.
Partnerships drive scale. No company can do it alone. The winners will be those who integrate networks — clinical, financial, and regulatory.
Asia is not just cheap labor. That’s an outdated narrative. Asia is talent, capital, and markets. Those who treat it as peripheral will miss the biggest healthcare transformation of the century.
A Personal Note
Relocating with my wife and two young daughters was not an easy decision. We had never planned to leave Hungary. Yet the moment we arrived in Singapore, it felt right. The schools, the safety, the opportunities — it was the environment I wanted my children to grow up in.
We didn’t just move countries. We moved into a future we wanted to be part of.
Looking Forward
Today, Singapore is home. It is where I run CRU Global, where I build new ventures, and where I invest in the next generation of healthcare innovation. From here, I remain deeply connected to Europe, but with a vantage point that is global, not regional.
The decision to move was fast. The impact is lasting.
From Budapest to Singapore, I learned that sometimes the most important choices are not the ones you overthink. They are the ones you feel, recognize, and act on without delay.
Because when the right ecosystem meets the right vision, everything else falls into place.
Timecode:
00:00 Why and How I Moved to Singapore
00:04 Starting My Healthcare MBA Journey
00:56 Discovering Singapore
01:27 Making the Move Permanent
01:45 Professional and Personal Benefits of Singapore
02:07 Expanding into the Asian Market
03:20 Singapore: The Ideal Business Hub
Links:
Peter M. Kovacs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermkovacs/
Peter M. Kovacs Personal Website:https://www.petermkovacs.com/
PMK Group Website: https://www.pmk-group.com/
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Why and how I move to Singapore. It is a very interesting story. So I was visiting a, a private university in Frankfurt, Germany, doing my international healthcare MBA, which is quite unique, uh, globally because there is a very few academia is doing, uh, dedicated healthcare MBA programs, but I find one of the best one in, uh, Frankfurt.
I applied and I started this program in, uh, 2018. And, uh, it was very interesting because it was a two years program and, uh, we were almost 30 people from more than 20 different countries, healthcare professionals. We were traveling around the world together, so we were visiting the best healthcare system in the world, starting in Baltimore and Washington and John Hopkins Hospital.
We moved there later on too. India, Bangalore. We moved, uh, Abu Dhabi and also one station was Singapore. I arrived to Singapore in September, 2018. [00:01:00] We spent there two weeks with this MBA program, and I saw from the very first day that this is the country i, i, I dream of. So, so it was so clean. Everything was so well developed, everything was on the right place.
Everything was just operating well, which is quite rare, especially in the central eastern European region where I'm coming from. So Singapore was just, just a dream for me. So my first visit was in September, 2018. In October, we were already visiting the primary schools with my kids, and, um, since December, I'm, I'm a Singaporean resident, so it was a very strong decision because it was a so huge big impact on me.
This, uh. Professionalism also this, um, perfect environment. I'm not just talking about the professional environment, but also the, the entire ecosystem and also the, uh, the weather condition, the living conditions, the safety, the cleanliness, the, so Singapore is the cleanest, the [00:02:00] greenest and the richest country on the world.
So it was the main goal. And the main reason why I, I moved to Singapore. On the other hand, of course, based on my professional and based on my plan, we started the extension in, into the Asian market. So we had a. Uh, main, uh, private research clinic in Hanoi, Vietnam. But of course, I, I wouldn't leave, uh, in Vietnam, especially with small kids.
So it was a good option to stay in the best country in Asia, uh, and uh, to be able to visit the surrounding countries, which is the future, not just in clinical research, but in many businesses because the Asian population is not just big, but the middle class is increasing very quickly, which is the target, uh, of most of them.
Not just healthcare, but many, many, uh, different industries. So Asia market is coming up. Many D countries, they are very well developed, uh, like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and also China is coming up. Many other countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, they're coming up not just in the healthcare.[00:03:00]
Industry, but, uh, many other field. So it was a very good spot to stay and move my, my headquarter to Singapore because all of these countries are easily available. Also, we have very good partners in Australia, New Zealand, which countries are very far from everywhere, but much closer to Singapore. Uh, so Singapore was a very good location.
Singapore is a business hub. It is a financial hub. It is a biotech hub. Now it's became a AI hub, so it is a very, very good, um, location to, to build your business. The government is supporting all of the businesses with tax incentives and also many programs and, uh, grants and also technical and operational support.
The people are very hard workers, all of the Singaporeans, so it's easy to work with them as a partner or as as employees. So it, it was a very good and the right decision.