The Newmatic Story: Singapore Roots, African Kitchens
How a Singapore kitchen brand found its biggest audience thousands of kilometres away, and why it ended up selling the whole kitchen rather than just the cooker.
Living with your kitchen
Most appliance brands tell their story through products: the first oven, the clever hob, the fridge that won an award. Newmatic’s story is better told through places. It starts in Singapore, crosses the Indian Ocean and settles into showrooms in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Nigeria, where people walk in with a floor plan, a budget and a family’s worth of opinions about how dinner should be cooked.
That journey shaped what the brand sells. Somebody building a new home does not want a cooker on its own. They want to know whether the hood will clear the hob, whether the sink suits the worktop and who will come round when something goes wrong. So the range grew to answer those questions, one category at a time.
This is a short account of that growth, written for anyone curious about the brand behind the badge, wherever they happen to be reading.
The starting point
Newmatic is a Singapore brand with showrooms and branches in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Nigeria. It grew by following new kitchens, and its range grew to cover the whole room.
A Singapore beginning
Newmatic calls itself Singapore’s own brand of built-in kitchen appliances. Its founder came to it with more than three decades in the domestic appliance trade, which explains a lot about the brand’s priorities. People who have spent that long around kitchens tend to care less about launch-day novelty and more about what happens in year five.
That experience shows up in unglamorous questions. Is the control easy to use with wet hands? Can a worn part be replaced without replacing the whole appliance? Do the finishes and dimensions across the range actually work together? None of these will make an advertisement. All of them shape what it is like to own a kitchen.
Singapore is a fitting place for that mindset. Space is precious, homes are planned to the centimetre and a built-in appliance has to earn its place inside a cabinet run rather than sit in a corner. A brand that grows up there learns early that an appliance is part of a room, not a separate purchase.
The brand’s own summary of its aim is simple: safe, durable, functional kitchen equipment and the services to go with it, so that people can enjoy cooking. Its slogan, “Built for Life”, says the same thing in three words.
Going where the kitchens were being built
Newmatic’s largest presence today is in East Africa, with seven showrooms in Kenya alone and further branches in Tanzania, Uganda and Nigeria. It went where people were building. The OECD expects Africa’s urban population to double from about 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050, and every one of those new homes will need somewhere to cook.
That kind of growth creates a particular kind of customer. People finishing a new apartment or house are often choosing cabinets, worktops, sinks, extraction and appliances at the same time, while juggling a builder’s schedule and a family’s wishes. They need answers about how things fit together, not just a price list.
A coordinated range makes that conversation easier. Homeowner, designer and installer can compare sizes, finishes and functions in one place, and spot problems before an opening is cut or a cabinet is made. It is far cheaper to move a line on a drawing than to recut a stone worktop.
No single market stands in for a continent, and no single household stands in for a city. What the expansion really built was a network of places where a broad catalogue could be turned into a specific kitchen, by people who know the local buildings and the local ways of cooking.
Opening doors when others were closing
The pandemic years were hard on anyone who sold physical goods. Shipping was slow, travel stopped and many shops shut for long stretches. A 2023 television news report described Newmatic expanding into Uganda and Tanzania during that period, and business coverage the same year discussed the growth of its regional showrooms.
There is no need to turn that into legend. Opening a showroom is a lot of ordinary work: finding premises, getting stock through ports, training staff and supporting customers in a new place. Doing it while supply chains were tangled took persistence more than glamour.
For buyers, a physical showroom has a plain advantage over a website. You can open the oven door, turn the hob knob, run a hand round the inside of a sink bowl and judge how high the hood sits above your own head. A dimension on a page becomes real when you are standing next to it.
A showroom only starts the relationship, though. Delivery, installation and support turn a purchase into a working kitchen, and that is where the brand has put much of its effort, as the rest of this story shows.
Why the range kept growing
The current catalogue goes well beyond hobs and ovens. It covers extraction, refrigeration, dishwashers, sinks and taps, stone worktops, storage hardware, power tracks, lighting and coffee machines. That breadth was not an accident. It is what customers kept asking for.
There is a long tradition behind the idea. In 1926 the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen, a compact fitted kitchen planned from time-and-motion studies. About 10,000 were built into new housing, according to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was one of the first kitchens designed as a single working system rather than a room full of furniture.
The same logic holds a century later. Follow a meal from fridge to worktop, through the sink, onto the hob and back again as dirty plates. Choose all of those pieces together and the clashes show up early: a tap that hits the window sill, a fridge door that meets a wall, a socket in the one spot that always gets splashed.
A complete range does not replace an accurate plan. What it does is put all the pieces, and all their dimensions, on the same table at the same time, which is where most good kitchens are actually decided.
The part of the story after the sale
Service is one of the strongest threads in Newmatic’s catalogue. It describes its own technicians, managed spare-parts support and repair work that can extend to circuit-board level. Those are practical commitments rather than a promise that nothing will ever go wrong.
The difference matters. Every appliance can develop a fault. What decides whether it keeps working is whether someone can diagnose the problem, find the right part and fit it. A brand that keeps parts and trains its own people is betting that its customers would rather repair than replace.
The catalogue also talks about lifetime service and support. Read that as an ongoing relationship, separate from the length and terms of any individual warranty. When you buy, ask for the warranty, the installation arrangements and the service route for each specific model.
Then keep a simple folder: model numbers, receipts and installation sheets in one place. A kitchen is assembled from dozens of parts, and knowing exactly which ones you have makes any future call shorter and any repair faster.
What the catalogue is made of
A brand story is only convincing if you can touch it. Newmatic’s catalogue leans on solid materials: stainless steel, glass and metal controls, with attention to finishes, tolerances and parts shared across models.
Judge those materials product by product. Different grades of stainless steel suit different jobs. A coating changes the look of a surface, not what lies beneath it. A glass hob needs its own care and a properly prepared worktop to sit in.
No single premium-sounding word settles the question. What matters is whether the material suits the job. A sink has to cope with hot water, grit and scrubbing. A hob knob has to feel sure under a greasy thumb. A cabinet light has to show you the chopping board without glaring in your eyes.
That is why a showroom visit is worth the trip. Touch the surfaces, turn the controls and ask what each specification means at seven in the evening with three pans on the go. The guide to kitchen sinks and taps is a good place to start on the busiest corner of the room.
One brand, many ways of cooking
A catalogue can show one tidy style, but every kitchen ends up belonging to the people in it. Some cook everything from scratch. Some live on quick weekday meals and save the ambition for weekends. In plenty of homes, three generations share one hob and argue about the best way to use it.
Fuel varies too. The International Energy Agency reports that gas, in the form of LPG, accounts for more than 70 per cent of clean cooking access in Africa, while electricity is the second most common choice. Hobs that combine gas burners with induction zones make sense in a world where many cooks want both, or want a backup.
Appearance is personal as well. Warm timber, pale stone and dark appliances can make one coherent kitchen; bright white and brushed steel can make another. The useful test is whether the room feels welcoming and easy to understand for everyone who uses it.
This is where a story about countries becomes a story about households. The route from Singapore to showrooms across Africa only matters if it helps someone, somewhere, cook dinner more comfortably tonight.
Where your kitchen fits in
Your own chapter starts with a brief, not a shopping list. Write down what you cook, what frustrates you about the current kitchen and the moments when the room feels crowded. Those notes give every specification a purpose.
Then get practical. Measure the space, gather the cabinet drawings and decide who will coordinate appliances, surfaces, gas, water and electricity. A complete range is most useful when someone is holding a complete plan.
Take that plan to a Newmatic showroom and test it. Open the doors, pull out the drawers, talk through extraction and ask how each model will be installed and serviced. Look at the kitchen as a finished room, and also as a set of working parts someone may need to reach one day.
The Newmatic story runs from Singapore to kitchens across Africa, through a widening range and a lot of patient service work. In your home it becomes something smaller and better: a meal that comes together easily, a room that makes sense, and equipment chosen with the years ahead in mind.
