Legendary Malaysian-Chinese tycoon Robert Kuok keeps a low profile when it comes to press interviews. Malaysian TV scooped one in 1994 but it was two years before it was broadcast and subsequent requests have been brushed aside. Kuok's handlers believe there is nothing wrong with keeping their 73-year-old boss under wraps. They point out that he built his empire through vision, tenacity, risk-taking and guanxi the connections that ease business transactions. A high public profile is neither necessary nor desirable. "Mystique helps," says Joanne Watkins, one of his chief PR aides. "It creates great curiosity about him."
What did come over in the TV interview was Kuok's aversion to pompous or romantic descriptions of his business career. Asked reverently about his "sense of mission" as a great entrepreneur, he bluntly replied that "the most important thing was to make money". And what was the secret of successful business leadership? "Like Genghis Khan in his best days, you have to share the spoils of victory," he replied.
Over the last half-century, Kuok has diversified from a base of commodities trading into beverages, industrial manufacturing, real estate, shipping, investment and insurance, the media and perhaps most visibly hotels. His Shangri-La hotels form the biggest, most profitable chain of luxury lodgings in Asia.
Kuok's publicly traded holdings are worth at least $7.5 billion. But some analysts reckon that's only about a third of the total. "I'm confident that Kuok's private holdings represent at least two-thirds of his wealth," says John Mulcahy, managing director of WI Carr (Far East), in Hong Kong.
Kuok's riches seem set to grow even more spectacularly as China prepares to take over in Hong Kong this year. Leading overseas Chinese businessmen have offered themselves sometimes with unseemly enthusiasm as intermediaries between the mainland authorities and their future subjects. Among these mega-millionaire supporters of Beijing none has higher standing with mainland officials than Kuok. He began investing heavily in China well before other overseas entrepreneurs, and went ahead with his projects even when political events turned the Beijing authorities into temporary pariahs abroad. Kuok had a neat line on this sort of situation in his TV interview. "A nimble businessman gets very wealthy when there are political developments," he says. "In every crisis, big fortunes are made."
"Back in the early 1980s," says Mulcahy, "when other overseas Chinese businessmen were currying favour with Beijing by setting up foundations building hospitals and schools in their home towns, Kuok was already making real investments." And when foreign entrepreneurs and visitors steered clear in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Kuok continued to finance his $480-million investment in Beijing's World Trade Center, even though rooms in his luxury Shangri-La hotel at the Center's hub were going begging for $30 a night. "The Chinese remember that," says Robert Hutchinson, director of marketing for Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts. "Obviously, it gives him a competitive advantage."
So it's unsurprising that nobody gets better locations in China for his buildings than Kuok. By 1998, 14 Shangri-La hotels will be operating on the choicest downtown acreage in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in lesser-known cities such as Dalian in the north-east and Wuhan to the west. Besides choice locations, Kuok has unparalleled political clout on his side. Other entrepreneurs worry that their projects in China will be slowed by bureaucratic inertia. "With Robert Kuok that isn't a concern," says Rohan Dalziell, investment analyst at ING Baring Securities (Hong Kong). "One of the beauties of investing in his Shangri-La hotels is the certainty they will be on as fast a track as possible."
In China with this sort of influence a high-priority construction job backed by local and national authorities can literally be rammed through. As David Hayden, managing director of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, puts it: "It's done by edict. 'We're relocating you tomorrow. The bulldozers will be through in the morning.' You'd have to go back to Baron Haussmann in [19th-century] Paris to have seen that sort of thing in the west."
Capitalizing on politics
Perhaps because a grateful Beijing government gives such precedence to his projects, Kuok claims not to have encountered the corruption that many businesspeople complain is endemic. "Wherever I go [in China]," he said in his TV interview, "I find the quality of leadership is getting better all the time the norms of integrity, the [numbers of] Chinese willing to serve their nation with no hope of personal gain." Kuok went on to applaud the Chinese Communist party as "the backbone of the nation", and predicted that as long as the party kept its unity, China would "only go from strength to strength".
Politics has rarely been a barrier to Kuok's business dealings. He was born in 1923 in Johor Baharu on the tip of the Malayan peninsula just over the strait from the island of Singapore. His father, an immigrant to the British colony from southern China's Fujian province, was a comfortably-off commodities trader who sent all three of his sons to private, British-run schools. At Raffles College in Singapore, one of Kuok's fellow students was Lee Kuan Yew, the future prime minister of Singapore.
Kuok's education was curtailed by Japan's invasion of Singapore in 1942, but he turned the occupation to his advantage by getting a job with a Mitsubishi trading company and learning fluent Japanese. After the war, Kuok remained aloof from the Malayan independence movement. When his younger brother, a prominent Communist guerrilla, was ambushed by British colonial forces in 1952 and fatally wounded, Kuok moved to London to master the intricacies of commodities trading.
It was as a commodities broker that Kuok first gained prominence. By the early 1970s he was known as the Sugar King because from time to time he controlled up to 10% of the world sugar market. His commercial skills took him into new ventures, including sugar plantations and refineries in Malaysia, where he enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the domestic market. He then diversified into palm oil, chemicals, shipping, real estate, and hotels throughout south-east Asia.