Asian Tour


The Asian Tour is the principal men's professional golf tour in Asia except for Japan (which has its own Japan Golf Tour). It is also a full member of the International Federation of PGA Tours. Official money events on the tour count for Official World Golf Ranking points.

The Asian Tour is administered from Singapore. It is controlled by a board with a majority of professional golfers, and a Tournament Players Committee of its player members, supported by an executive team. The chairman of the board is the Indonesian businessman Jimmy Masrin.

The Asian PGA was formed in July 1994 at a meeting in Hong Kong attended by PGA representatives from eight countries. The first season of the APGA Omega Tour, as it was known for sponsorship reasons, was played in 1995 and within a few years it had supplanted the existing tour in the region, the Asia Golf Circuit that was run by the Asia Pacific Golf Confederation, as the leading golf tour in Asia outside of Japan. In 1998 the Asian Tour became the sixth member of the International Federation of PGA Tours.[1] Under a new sponsorship deal, between 1999 and 2003 the tour was known as the Davidoff Tour, before adopting its current name in 2004.

In 2002, the tour moved its office from Hong Kong to Malaysia and in 2004 the tour was taken over by a new organisation established by the players, who had been in dispute with the previous management. In 2007 it moved to new headquarters on the resort island of Sentosa in Singapore,[2] which is also the home to what was at that time the tour's richest sole sanctioned tournament, the Singapore Open.

In 2009 a rival tour, the OneAsia Tour, was established. Relations between the two tours are hostile.

In 2010, the Asian Tour launched the Asian Development Tour (ADT) as a developmental circuit. Five events were played the first year. By 2015 the tour had expanded to holding 28 tournaments with US$2.2 million of prize money.