A Chaozhou refugee built a Pacific business archipelago
Sir Ka-shing Li, born 1928 in Guangdong to Teochew parents, chaired CK Hutchison and CK Asset before retiring from those roles. Investments span transport, property, finance, retail, and energy across Cheung Kong's web of companies. He began by making plastic flowers in a factory funded with savings and family loans.
Li Ka-shing was born on 29 July 1928 in Chao'an, Chaozhou, in Guangdong, and fled with his family to Hong Kong in 1940 to escape the Sino-Japanese War. After his father died of tuberculosis, he left school at 15 to work in a plastics trading company. In 1950, having learned to run a plant, he started his own plastics maker with savings and money borrowed from relatives, studying trade journals and learning to blend colour into plastic to make lifelike artificial flowers.
He bought a site for his own factory building in 1958, and when property prices collapsed after the 1967 riots drove many people out of Hong Kong, he bet the slump was temporary and bought land. Cheung Kong's winning 1977 bid for sites above the Central and Admiralty MTR stations let it challenge Hongkong Land as the city's leading developer, and in 1979 it acquired a large holding in Hutchison Whampoa, sold to it by Hong Kong Bank.
CK Hutchison builds businesses and sells them when it can: its stake in Orange went to Mannesmann in 1999 for a profit of US$15.12 billion, and control of the Indian mobile operator Hutchison Essar went to Vodafone for US$11.1 billion. Its retail arm, AS Watson, runs more than 15,000 stores, including Superdrug in Britain and Watsons in Asia, and through CK Infrastructure Li holds 75 percent of Northumbrian Water. His Horizons Ventures backed Zoom and Impossible Foods, and in 2011 made the fifteen-year-old Nick D'Aloisio of Summly the youngest person ever to receive venture capital.
Li announced his retirement on 16 March 2018, handing a US$100 billion empire to his son Victor; his other son, Richard, chairs PCCW, Hong Kong's largest telecom company. In 2005 he pledged to give his charitable foundations everything raised by selling his CA$1.2 billion holding in the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Bloomberg put his net worth at US$35.3 billion in July 2021, yet he has long dressed plainly, wearing a HK$50 Citizen watch in the 1990s.
Source: Li Ka-shing
