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30-10-2015, 09:30 PM
Opportunity knocks as tycoon Li Ka-shing invests beyond China
Rowan Callick
[Image: rowan_callick.png]
Asia Pacific Editor
Melbourne
[b]Li Ka-shing owns more assets in Australia — albeit indirectly through companies he controls — than any other foreign citizen. Those holdings, chiefly in utilities, seem locked in for now.[/b]
But over the past year he has steadily reoriented his core companies in a direction that some back home in Hong Kong, and in China, find highly troubling.
In the past, the Hong Kong magnate has enjoyed low-key visits to Australia, especially to Queensland to play golf. But he is not a familiar figure.
Indeed, back in 1999, the then South Australian opposition leader, Mike Rann, said when Li’s Hutchison Whampoa bought into power distribution there: “I guess what people want to know is if they flick on their switch to their power, would the Red Guards be rejoicing?”
No, Li is not your classic Red Guard fanatic, if any might still be found. The Cultural Revolution was already over for 23 years when Rann made his remark.
But for generations Hong Kong shareholders have rejoiced at Li’s performance, constantly magicking improved returns.
Queues form long before the doors open for the annual meetings of Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa, the core companies Li chairs.
He may resemble an elderly Chinese Clark Kent, but he is widely dubbed Superman.
His family empire is ubiquitous in greater China, incorporating the ParknShop supermarkets, the massive Watson chemist-plus chain and telcos, container ports and power utilities around the world.
The British author Joe Studwell describes in Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia how Li is widely believed to have arrived penniless as a young teenager from Shantou in China and to have made his first few dollars selling plastic flowers.
“In reality,” says Studwell, “Li went to school for a couple of years and then started working for a wealthy uncle.
“Subsequently, he became part of an important subcategory of tycoons who got ahead, in part, by marrying the boss’s daughter.”
Myth or man, Li has been venerated not only in Hong Kong, but also in mainland China as a model tycoon who builds friendly relations with party chiefs and makes sure to give generously to his original home community, including funding a Buddhist monastery with bulletproof rooms for VIP guests.
In polling a few years ago, mainland Chinese said that Li was the wealthy person they most admired, followed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the Chinese property tycoon Wang Shi and basketball giant Yao Ming.
His Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa own an eighth of the entire world’s container shipping capacity, and an eighth of HK’s sharemarket capitalisation.
He holds a Canadian passport. But in his home of Hong Kong, and in mainland China from where he originally came, he is finding himself in the unaccustomed role of being accused of being a turncoat and sellout.
This follows a steady restructuring of key assets, which started in late 2013 with spinning off Hong Kong Electric, reaping $10 billion of which $3.4bn was profit.
Once Power Assets Holdings, a venerable corporation with $12bn in cash, is taken over by Cheung Kong Infrastructure it will join the rest of the Li empire in being owned in the Cayman Islands, not in Hong Kong.
Li is promising CKI and PAH shareholders a special dividend should the deal go through.
The South China Morning Post commented that “this is a case of wooing kids with their own candies, but this is not the first time Li has worked such magic”.
Last year, he sold a quarter of AS Watson, his retail business, to Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temsek for $8bn.
Earlier this year, he switched incorporation of his other firms to the Cayman Islands, and merged all non-property businesses into a vehicle named CK Hutchison.
At the same time, he started buying heavily in Europe, apparently estimating that there were bargains to be had — and that China’s steady slowdown would diminish opportunities there.
Hutchison Whampoa bought British mobile phone operator O2 for about $19bn.
Three Li corporations combined last year to buy, for $2.4bn, Australian gas pipeline company Envestra.
But a commercial complex due for completion in Shanghai has been put up for sale, analysts say, for $4.5bn.
An article in a publication of a think tank owned by China’s news agency Xinhua said: “Don’t let Li Ka-shing run away.”
Another story, in a People’s Daily publication, Security Times, said Li should be “let go” because “the sky will not collapse” and that instead China should seek capital that “represents the future”.
Meanwhile, the best known rich list published in China, the Hurun Report, says Li has just been overtaken as the wealthiest figure in Asia, and as the richest Chinese person in the world, by Wang Jianlin, executive chairman of the property development and entertainment group Wanda.
Hurun says Wang Jianlin is now worth about $57bn and Li about $44bn.
Has the magic gone? It may be fading, in terms of Li’s formerly formidable influence over regional leaders. Deng Xiaoping, whose benign take on tycoons came from smoke-filled meetings with Li and his HK peers, urged them to invest in China, which they did massively.
Li retained strong connections with Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. But Xi Jinping, who instinctively embodies the ruling Communist Party, is less taken with tycoons. HK’s embattled chief executive CY Leung is following suit.
But Li is showing no signs of losing his nerve. China and HK seem overpriced, so he’s seizing other global opportunities.
This would seem like a good time for Australia to go courting the 87-year-old Li.
- THE AUSTRALIAN
- SEPTEMBER 24, 2015 12:00AM
Rowan Callick
[Image: rowan_callick.png]
Asia Pacific Editor
Melbourne
[b]Li Ka-shing owns more assets in Australia — albeit indirectly through companies he controls — than any other foreign citizen. Those holdings, chiefly in utilities, seem locked in for now.[/b]
But over the past year he has steadily reoriented his core companies in a direction that some back home in Hong Kong, and in China, find highly troubling.
In the past, the Hong Kong magnate has enjoyed low-key visits to Australia, especially to Queensland to play golf. But he is not a familiar figure.
Indeed, back in 1999, the then South Australian opposition leader, Mike Rann, said when Li’s Hutchison Whampoa bought into power distribution there: “I guess what people want to know is if they flick on their switch to their power, would the Red Guards be rejoicing?”
No, Li is not your classic Red Guard fanatic, if any might still be found. The Cultural Revolution was already over for 23 years when Rann made his remark.
But for generations Hong Kong shareholders have rejoiced at Li’s performance, constantly magicking improved returns.
Queues form long before the doors open for the annual meetings of Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa, the core companies Li chairs.
He may resemble an elderly Chinese Clark Kent, but he is widely dubbed Superman.
His family empire is ubiquitous in greater China, incorporating the ParknShop supermarkets, the massive Watson chemist-plus chain and telcos, container ports and power utilities around the world.
The British author Joe Studwell describes in Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia how Li is widely believed to have arrived penniless as a young teenager from Shantou in China and to have made his first few dollars selling plastic flowers.
“In reality,” says Studwell, “Li went to school for a couple of years and then started working for a wealthy uncle.
“Subsequently, he became part of an important subcategory of tycoons who got ahead, in part, by marrying the boss’s daughter.”
Myth or man, Li has been venerated not only in Hong Kong, but also in mainland China as a model tycoon who builds friendly relations with party chiefs and makes sure to give generously to his original home community, including funding a Buddhist monastery with bulletproof rooms for VIP guests.
In polling a few years ago, mainland Chinese said that Li was the wealthy person they most admired, followed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the Chinese property tycoon Wang Shi and basketball giant Yao Ming.
His Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa own an eighth of the entire world’s container shipping capacity, and an eighth of HK’s sharemarket capitalisation.
He holds a Canadian passport. But in his home of Hong Kong, and in mainland China from where he originally came, he is finding himself in the unaccustomed role of being accused of being a turncoat and sellout.
This follows a steady restructuring of key assets, which started in late 2013 with spinning off Hong Kong Electric, reaping $10 billion of which $3.4bn was profit.
Once Power Assets Holdings, a venerable corporation with $12bn in cash, is taken over by Cheung Kong Infrastructure it will join the rest of the Li empire in being owned in the Cayman Islands, not in Hong Kong.
Li is promising CKI and PAH shareholders a special dividend should the deal go through.
The South China Morning Post commented that “this is a case of wooing kids with their own candies, but this is not the first time Li has worked such magic”.
Last year, he sold a quarter of AS Watson, his retail business, to Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temsek for $8bn.
Earlier this year, he switched incorporation of his other firms to the Cayman Islands, and merged all non-property businesses into a vehicle named CK Hutchison.
At the same time, he started buying heavily in Europe, apparently estimating that there were bargains to be had — and that China’s steady slowdown would diminish opportunities there.
Hutchison Whampoa bought British mobile phone operator O2 for about $19bn.
Three Li corporations combined last year to buy, for $2.4bn, Australian gas pipeline company Envestra.
But a commercial complex due for completion in Shanghai has been put up for sale, analysts say, for $4.5bn.
An article in a publication of a think tank owned by China’s news agency Xinhua said: “Don’t let Li Ka-shing run away.”
Another story, in a People’s Daily publication, Security Times, said Li should be “let go” because “the sky will not collapse” and that instead China should seek capital that “represents the future”.
Meanwhile, the best known rich list published in China, the Hurun Report, says Li has just been overtaken as the wealthiest figure in Asia, and as the richest Chinese person in the world, by Wang Jianlin, executive chairman of the property development and entertainment group Wanda.
Hurun says Wang Jianlin is now worth about $57bn and Li about $44bn.
Has the magic gone? It may be fading, in terms of Li’s formerly formidable influence over regional leaders. Deng Xiaoping, whose benign take on tycoons came from smoke-filled meetings with Li and his HK peers, urged them to invest in China, which they did massively.
Li retained strong connections with Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. But Xi Jinping, who instinctively embodies the ruling Communist Party, is less taken with tycoons. HK’s embattled chief executive CY Leung is following suit.
But Li is showing no signs of losing his nerve. China and HK seem overpriced, so he’s seizing other global opportunities.
This would seem like a good time for Australia to go courting the 87-year-old Li.