Hong Kong real estate tycoon Lee Shaw Kee has built tens of thousands of apartments for the descendants of middle-class refugees who fled the Chinese Communist mainland. He was 97 years old.
His death was announced by the company he founded, Henderson Land Development. He didn't say he was quoting the cause of where he died.
Throughout his 70s, Lee became even wealthier through clever financial investments that had come to be known as Hong Kong's Warren Buffett. After his death, Forbes magazine was considered to be worth $29.2 billion, making him the 63rd wealthiest person in the world.
Lee founded the Henderson Land Development in 1976. By the time he resigned as chairman and managing director in 2019 at the age of 91, the company had grown to 10,000 employees, extending beyond real estate development to hotels, department stores and natural gas distribution.
He began his career as a gold and currency dealer and reinvested real estate profits. Most speculators and developers preferred a higher priced plot on Hong Kong Island. However, Lee was convinced that the tide of hardworking, upwardly moving refugees from the mainland and their descendants would raise property prices. He seized the chance and bought a large chunk of cheap farmland in new territory adjacent to the mainland.
His business strategy is based on a trend that shows wages are rising much faster than property prices, indicating that they place apartments within reach of hundreds of thousands of buyers and tenants. In the 1970s and 1980s, Henderson's land development built a new town called Shatitin, home to over half a million people.
“The young couple chose to live in their own home instead with their parents, as they traditionally did,” Lee told his official biographer, Leung Fung-Yee.
Lee himself lived in one of the unexplained residential towers, which his company loved to build throughout Hong Kong and spend golfing with fellow big names.
As his real estate business grew, Lee placed his management team with his children and relatives, including Nie and Ne. At least 10 people have held senior positions. Two sons, Peter and Martin, became co-chairs in 2019.
Lee led much of his philanthropy through the Lee Shawkie Foundation, funding university buildings and scholarships in Hong Kong, China and other countries. The foundation also funded vocational training for farmers and rural doctors in mainland China.
Lee once considered investing large investments abroad, he said, but ultimately decided to stay on the island. “Taxes are too high elsewhere,” he told Forbes in 1997, raising $340 million in tax-free dividends in 1996, bringing the majority of this windfall back to real estate ventures. “You couldn't make your profit snowman snow.”
Lee Shau-Kee was born on January 29, 1928 in Shunde, in Shunde, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, then known as the Canton of southern China, to Lee Gai-Fu and Chan Luan-Fung. A wealthy currency trader, his father sent to Hong Kong in 1948 when Mao Zedong communists were about to beat Chen Kaisek nationalists in the Chinese civil war.
As a teenager, Mr. Lee became a gold trader, first with his father and then with him. As an adult, he decided to move to Hong Kong and begin real estate development. He co-founded Sun Hung Kai Properties in 1963 with two other partners and began developing Henderson's land 13 years later.
Henderson became a publicly traded company in 1981, but most of its shares were owned by Lee Family members.
Mr. Lee occasionally had a business fallout with his relatives with his 15-year-old wife, Lau Wai Kuen, who divorced in 1981.
His survivors include his two sons, three daughters, his sister, Fung Lee Woon King, executive director of Henderson Land Development.
Towards the end of the 20th century, economic and political trends undermined the Hong Kong real estate market, which drove Lee to the world's wealthiest class. As China embraced capitalist reforms, foreign investors rushed to establish factories and offices on the mainland, and Shanghai challenged Hong Kong as Asia's outstanding financial capital. And with the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong and the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the island's cities lost some of the aura of freewheel business centres. Few companies have set up offices in Hong Kong, causing the local real estate market to stagnate.
Lee's critics predicted the decline of his empire and cited it as a warning story about the dangers of facing business beyond traditional family-owned organizations.
“Lee Shaw Kee is typical of the generation of Asian post-World War II Chinese entrepreneurs,” the Far East Economic Review said in 2001 in his long profile.
He proved such a destiny was wrong with profitable investments in new ventures such as financial stocks, derivatives and paper manufacturing. His touch was certain that he had tried to hide his investment plans from speculators in order to follow his every move.
At the same time, Mr. Lee was increasingly impatience with the heirs. In 1998 he told a Hong Kong journalist that after 10 years of family business guidance, his eldest son, Peter, was not ready to take over him. “He's only able to get the passing stage now,” Lee said.
At the time, investors and financial analysts were less impressed with another son, Martin, who had to overcome his youthful passion for sports cars and nightlife.
However, they regained his confidence over the years and took control of the company after Lee resigned.
Lee's sons have publicly declared their loyalty to their father and urged them to maintain family business leadership as much as possible. “I will be the first person to ask him not to retire,” Peter Lee told South China Morning Post in 2001.
The emotions coincided with Mr. Lee's own strong best friend sense. In 1996 he built a four-storey spirit US. This was topped with towers embedded with semi-precious stones on an acre of Darian, an ancestor village of the South Pearl River Delta family. He buried his parents there.
Ash Wu contributed the report.
