Keith Magnus, Founding Chairman of The Kallang Group, Honored at Impact INTL: Asia 2026

KEITH MAGNUS Founding Chairman The Kallang Group

HOBBY OUTSIDE OF WORK: “Playing bass and drums. The rhythm section is its own lesson in leadership. Bass and drums set the depth and the pulse of a band, and nobody really notices them until they stop.”

When Keith Magnus became chair of The Kallang Group, which oversees Singapore’s sports and entertainment district Kallang, it wasn’t just any appointment. Having grown up in Singapore in the 1970s, he recalls how, during “Malaysia Cup nights, the whole island seemed to converge on Kallang. When the matches sold out, my father would drive us down anyway. We would park on Nicoll Highway, wind the windows down and listen on the radio. The roar always arrived before the commentary did. You would hear 50,000 people before you heard the man describing them.”

Some 45 years later, following the Government’s decision to bring the Kallang precinct back into public hands, Magnus served as Singapore’s Chief Negotiator for the transition and was then asked to chair the Group. That was in 2022. Since then, The Kallang Group has delivered more than 5,000 event days – including six nights each of Coldplay and Taylor Swift, as well as four of Lady Gaga – welcoming more than 11 million visitors. Before that, “Singapore’s live calendar was sporadic at best, but from conversations across the industry and what we were seeing on the ground, I believed there was a substantial regional audience waiting to be unlocked.” Magnus spent nearly four decades in investment banking and says the lessons he learned “translate into live entertainment more directly than people might expect.”

Singapore is neither Asia’s largest nor its cheapest domestic market, but offers a “difficult to replicate” combination of “safety, connectivity, predictability, world-class infrastructure and regional access,” according to Magnus. “A tour requires demand. It also requires confidence.”

He intends to evolve The Kallang Group “from being a great host of other people’s intellectual property to increasingly becoming a creator and owner of world-class event IP ourselves. Singapore should not simply host more world-class shows. It should develop more world-class people capable of producing them. We are not trying merely to host an industry. We want to help build one.”

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/10/02/impact-intl-asia-2026-honoree-keith-magnus/)._