On 9 September, a True Fitness member paid S$79 for another month at the gym. The next night, an app notification told members that every club had closed with immediate effect. Ouch.
By 6pm the following day, the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE) had received 241 complaints, with more than S$609,000 in reported losses. That only counts the people who had complained by then. True’s own accounts show that at the end of 2025, customers had paid about S$17 million for memberships and training sessions that True had yet to deliver.
This Is Not the First Time
Singapore has seen this before.
In July 2016, California Fitness shut its three clubs in Bugis, Raffles Place and Novena overnight. About 27,000 members were owed S$20.8 million in unused access and training. The liquidators later found that the operator had run up more than S$20 million of losses by 2013, and that for the next three years 99% of its income came from members’ fees. Members were funding a business that was already bleeding. They got nothing back.
In February 2024, Ritual Gym closed all four of its outlets and went into provisional liquidation after a key investor pulled out.
And True itself has done this before. Its Malaysian clubs closed in June 2017, leaving members there chasing refunds.
Who Actually Owned True?
Not a local family business, for a start.
In 2017, Kontafarma China Holdings, a Hong Kong listed company that today mostly makes drugs in China, paid US$36.7 million for 51% of True’s Singapore and China clubs and 29% of its Taiwan business. The seller was True’s controlling shareholder, Patrick Wee. He promised the business would earn US$8.2 million in 2017, rising to US$13.8 million by 2019.
It never got close. The two sides have been in court in Hong Kong since 2019 over the shortfall. In 2021, Kontafarma took over shares Mr Wee had pledged as security, lifting its stake to 73%. His company still holds the other 27%. In October 2025, a Singapore court made him bankrupt, according to Kontafarma’s filings.
So True was not wholly owned by its listed parent, and the parent and the minority shareholder had been fighting each other for years. That is not a setup that encourages anyone to pour in fresh money.
Is True still running anywhere? As far as the filings show, no. The 2017 deal required Mr Wee to close his gyms in Malaysia and Thailand by the end of that year. Kontafarma describes Taiwan as the only other market it had left, and Taiwan shut in October 2025. Singapore was the last one standing and now no more.
Was the Writing on the Wall?
The warning came from Taiwan.
True’s Taiwan business was run by a franchisee that Mr Wee also controlled, with Kontafarma owning 29%. It abruptly suspended six outlets on 23 September 2025. A week later it announced that all operations would cease from 1 October, with at least NT$3 billion (about S$126 million) of total debts and liabilities. Taipei prosecutors opened an investigation after members filed a criminal complaint.
This mattered for Singapore more than it looked. Under the 2017 deal, the Taiwan franchisee paid the True group 15% of its turnover as royalties. That was worth HK$55.6 million in 2019, and it propped up the fitness division’s numbers for years. As Taiwan fell over, Kontafarma booked HK$373.6 million of impairments on its Taiwan and Singapore fitness businesses in the first half of 2025, including HK$161 million the Taiwan franchisee owed it.
At the time, a True Singapore spokesperson told Mothership that all its Singapore locations “operate with full parent company support”. Kontafarma says it kept providing cash. Eleven months later, the clubs shut anyway.
The signs kept coming. In March 2026, Kontafarma’s annual results said its losses “may cast significant doubt” on the group’s ability to carry on, although the directors still concluded it could, pointing to undrawn bank facilities and other plans. In August, it wrote off all the remaining goodwill on the Singapore business. Its half year results listed “significant downsizing” as an option for Singapore. The clubs shut two weeks later.
To be fair, not every signal pointed one way. On 27 July, True Yoga signed a new three year lease for its Millenia Walk club at S$255,961 a month. That is not what an owner planning to walk away six weeks later usually does. My read is that they were still trying to save it but in vain.
The catch is that all of this sat in filings on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Hardly any True member would have seen them.
Do Big Gyms Even Make Money in Singapore?
This is where it gets uncomfortable. True was barely profitable even before Covid.
In 2016, the year before the sale, True Fitness made HK$0.4 million before tax on HK$253 million of revenue. That is a margin of 0.2%. True Yoga lost HK$15 million the same year.
Then Covid more than halved revenue, and it never got back to its pre-Covid numbers.
By 2025, Singapore revenue was still 36% below 2018 with about the same number of clubs. The fitness division has lost money every year since 2020.
The problem is the cost base. A big gym is really a property business. You rent a huge space in a prime mall, fill it with equipment and staff it all day. None of that shrinks when members leave. In 2025, depreciation, mostly on leases and equipment, ate 34% of the fitness division’s revenue. The Millenia Walk and Ang Mo Kio leases alone cost about S$4.45 million a year, roughly 15% of Singapore revenue.
Competition squeezes from both ends. ActiveSG and condo gyms take the price-sensitive member. Boutique studios take the ones willing to pay more. The big gym in the middle gets caught.
The biggest chain in Singapore today works very differently. Anytime Fitness has grown to about 150 outlets since arriving in 2013. The clubs are small, open 24 hours and run by franchisees who put up their own capital. Its Singapore master franchisee is private, so there are no local numbers. But its Japanese counterpart, Fast Fitness Japan, was listed in Tokyo until a management buyout took it private in April 2026. In the six months to September 2025, it made an operating profit of ¥1.95 billion on ¥9.98 billion of sales, a margin of about 20%, with income coming in as monthly fees and franchise royalties. Compare that with True’s 0.2% in a good year.
We think big gyms in prime malls are a structurally tough business in Singapore. The models that seem to hold up are either small, cheap and lightly staffed, or premium enough to charge real prices. True was neither.
Your Package Is a Loan to the Gym
A gym that loses money can keep going for a long time, because members pay upfront.
At the end of 2025, True’s accounts carried HK$104.5 million (about S$17 million) of prepaid memberships and training it had not yet delivered. Accountants call this a contract liability. It is a promise of future sessions, not a pile of member cash set aside. In its half year going concern note, Kontafarma’s board wrote that the group’s contract liabilities would not “require substantial cash outflows”, resulting in “no liquidity risk”.
On paper, that is correct. A prepaid package is repaid in gym sessions, not cash. For the member, it is the whole problem. Paying upfront is like buying a bond from your gym. It pays no interest, there is no collateral, and if the gym defaults you queue behind the liquidator and the staff.
In the months before the closure, members say True’s salespeople pushed hard. One told MustShareNews that seven different salespeople approached him before his membership ran out in June, warning that prices would go up from January 2026.
The five year package, which staff called “very worth it”, only saves you money if you keep going and the gym stays open for almost four years. True shut about three months after that member’s renewal date.
A lifetime membership is only as long as the gym’s lifetime.
So What Should You Do?
True was part of Singapore’s fitness scene for more than two decades. Apparently, a 20-year track record isn’t a good yardstick for choosing a gym. So here are some rules to protect yourself.
- Pay monthly, or buy only what you can afford to lose. The discount on a long package is the gym paying you to carry its risk.
- Treat a hard sell as a warning. A gym pushing members to prepay years ahead may need the cash now.
- Check who owns it. If there is a listed parent, its announcements are free to read. True’s troubles were there for more than a year.
We have seen enough such prepayment failures in Singapore. Not just gyms. So be a smart consumer. Sometimes that is no different from being a smart investor. Figure out the economics of the business you are paying.
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