Hong kong's best-known billionaire has bet against market sentiment on many occasions and won. Despite his advancing years, the 74-year-old still clearly enjoys doing the business and as he tells William Mellor, he can still rise to any opportunity and challenge that may lay ahead.
In his 70th floor penthouse office looking north over Hong Kong harbor toward the Chinese main-land where he was born, Li Ka-shing talks about his rise from penniless refugee to head of a US$60 billion global business empire.
"I am never satisfied - like in the Olympics," says Li, whose deal-making exploits have earned him the nickname of chui yan, or Superman.
As a 12-year-old boy alone with a father dying of tuberculosis, Li swept factory floors to earn money during Japan's wartime occupation of Hong Kong. As a young man in the 1950s, he manufactured and sold plastic flowers.
Today, he owns the world's largest network of container ports, including Rotterdam's Europe Container Terminals and Hong Kong International Terminals and is acquiring, at about 2 percent of book value, bankrupt U.S. fiberoptic network operator Global Crossing Ltd.
He also has a Canadian oil company, Husky Energy Inc., a 3,000-store retail chain in Europe and Asia and real-estate holdings that include Oriental Plaza, the biggest development in Beijing since the Ming emperors built the Forbidden City 600 years ago.
He's also betting US$16.7 billion on an unproven wireless Internet phone technology - the so-called third generation, or 3G - in Britain and Italy and then in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel and Sweden.
That makes some investors question whether Superman, at 74 and with a personal fortune of at least US$6 billion based on the value of his seven publicly traded companies, is still invincible.
"There's a tremendous amount of skepticism among investors, even toward a man with a track record like Mr. Li," says Fred Hu, a Hong Kong-based managing director at Goldman Sachs.
Li controls four overseas-listed companies: Husky Energy, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange; two Nasdaq-listed companies - Internet travel discounter Priceline.com Inc. and Israeli cell phone company Partner Communications Co.; and Hutchison Telecommunications (Australia) Ltd., traded in Sydney.
Some bankers say the market is too negative in judging Li's plans. A Gold-man Sachs report published in November says Li has a strong enough balance sheet - US$16 billion in liquid assets plus at least US$3 billion in annual revenue from his non-telecom businesses.
In the first half of 2002, more than 50 percent of the US$5.97 billion revenue in Hutchison Whampoa - a conglomerate owned by Li - and 35 percent of its US$762 million net profit came from ports and retail. Telecommunications accounted for just 14 percent of revenue and 7 percent of net profit.
Li is venturing into the European telecom business at a time when other companies, crippled by the cost of acquiring licenses, are delaying or abandoning their 3G ambitions.
Li has gambled on what seemed like long shots before - and won. In 1967 when he branched out from making plastic flowers into real estate, it was during a year of rioting in Hong Kong.
Investors dumped apartments and land. Property prices plunged by as much as 50 percent, according to Peter Churchouse, advisory director at Morgan Stanley Asia in Hong Kong.
Li bought. When calm returned to Hong Kong, real estate prices recovered to their former values within two years.
Li repeated the feat in subsequent downturns, including in 1989, when real estate prices slumped.
The result: a Hong Kong property portfolio ranging from the suburban 'garden cities' built on former dockyards and industrial sites to his flagship building, the 70-story Cheung Kong Center.
Li vaulted to global prominence in 1979 when he bought control of Hutchison Whampoa and became the first Chinese to own one of the British-founded hongs, or trading houses, that had dominated the Hong Kong economy since 1841.
Li further confounded the British business elite by the low price he paid. Unknown to the Hutchison board, Li had secretly been negotiating with Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. to part with a 22 percent Hutchison share holding for HK$639 million, the equivalent of US$82 million at today's exchange rate and less than half of its book value, according to the board.
"For Li, it was a brilliant deal," said Bill Wyllie, an Australian entrepreneur who was managing director of Hutchison Whampoa at the time.
"The breakup value of the company was more than double the amount he paid, and our board was separately negotiating with would-be purchasers willing to pay a much higher price."
Wyllie, who now runs his own business in Perth, says he was bitterly opposed to the sale. "It was a dumb move by the Hongkong Bank, which let its shareholders down, but you have to give full marks to Li.
"He was a real mover and shaker who had built up a tremendous reputation because of his reliability and honesty and it enabled him to pull off what for Hong Kong was the coup of the century."
(eastday.com January 3, 2003)
