Lee Shau-Ke, a Hong Kong real estate tycoon, who made the huge fortune building tens of thousands of apartments for medium-class refugees who had left communist mainland, died on Monday. He was 97 years old.
His death was announced by the company he founded, Henderson Land Development. He did not say where he died or reports a cause.
Well in the 1970s, Mr Lee became even richer through the smart economic investment that some have prompted him to call him a Hong Kong Warren Buffett. In his death, Forbes magazine estimates that the value of value at $ 29.2 billion, making him the 63rd richest man in the world.
Mr Lee founded Henderson Land Development in 1976. Until he resigned as his chairman and chief executive in 2019 at the age of 91, the company had developed to 10,000 employees and spread beyond the development of real estate in hotels, departments and natural gas distribution.
He began his career as a gold and legislative representative, reinstalling his profits on real estate. Most speculators and developers preferred a higher price plots on the island of Hong Kong. However, Mr Lee was sure that the growing tide of labor work, upward mobile refugees from the mainland and their offspring would send the prices of real estate to rise. It took a chance by buying large pieces of cheap agricultural land in the new territories bordering the mainland.
His business strategy, he said, was based on trends showing that salaries increased much faster than real estate prices, placing apartments to hundreds of thousands of buyers and tenants. In the 1970s and 80s, Henderson Land Development raised the new town of Shar Tin, which hosts over half a million people.
“Young couples choose to live in their homes instead of their parents, as they had traditionally done,” said Lee, said the official biographer of Leung Fung-Yee.
Mr Lee himself lived in one of the unstable inhabited towers whose company built throughout Hong Kong. He liked to spend the free time of golf with fellow tycoons.
As his real estate company grew up, Mr Lee was staffing his administration with relatives, including children and his nieces and nieces. At least 10 of them held superior positions. Two sons, Petros and Martin, became common presidents in 2019.
Mr Lee has channeled most of his charity through the Lee Shau-KEE Foundation, funding buildings and scholarships at universities in Hong Kong, China and other countries. The Foundation also funded vocational training for farmers and farmers in mainland China.
Mr Lee once considered significant investments abroad, he said, but in the end decided to stay on the island. “Elsewhere taxes are too high,” he told Forbes in 1997, noting that in 1996 he raised $ 340 million in tax -free dividends, plowing most of this unexpected back to his real estate. “You couldn’t snow your profits.”
Lee Shau-Ke was born on January 29, 1928, in Shunde, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, southern China, Lee Gai-Fu and Chan Luan-Fung. His father, a coin dealer, sent him to Hong Kong in 1948, when Mao Zenong’s Communists were going to triumph over Chiang Kai-Sec’s nationalists in the Civil War of China.
As a teenager, Mr. Lee became a golden trader, first with his father and then alone. As an adult, he decided to move to Hong Kong and start developing real estate. He wrote Sun Hong Kai Properties with two other partners in 1963 and began the development of Earth Henderson with his own 13 years later.
Henderson became a public company negotiated in 1981, although the majority of its shares belonged to members of the Lee family.
Mr Lee had casual business broadcasts with his relatives, mainly with his 15-year-old wife, Lau Wai-Kuen, who divorced in 1981.
His survivors include his two sons, three daughters and his sister, Fung Lee Woon King, executive of Henderson Land Development.
By the end of the 20th century, economic and political trends undermined the Hong Kong real estate market that had promoted Mr Lee to the ranks of the richest people in the world. With China hugging capitalist reforms, foreign investors rushed to set up factories and offices in the mainland, and Shanghai questioned Hong Kong as Asia’s primary financial capital. And with the end of British colonialism in Hong Kong and his return to Chinese domination in 1997, the island city lost some of the aura of a free business center. With fewer companies installing offices in Hong Kong, the local real estate market stood stagnant.
Mr Lee’s critics predicted the decline of his empire, citing it as a warning story of the dangers of a business that had overcome the traditional family organization.
“Lee Shau-Ke is characteristic of the generation of Chinese entrepreneurs after World War II in Asia,” Mr Lee said, “Mr Lee said,” he had difficulty preparing for a new generation and a new business environment. “
It has been shown that such bodies are wrong with profitable investments in financial reserves, derivatives and new businesses such as paper production. His touch was so confident that he tried to hide his investment plans from speculators trying to follow every move.
At the same time, Mr Lee was increasing more and more impatient with his heirs. In 1998, he told Hong Kong reporters that after a decade of guardianship in the family business, his oldest son, Peter, was not ready to succeed him. “It only gets a degree that passes now,” said Lee.
At that time, investors and financial analysts were even less impressed by another son, Martin, who had to overcome a youthful passion for sports cars and nightlife.
But they regained his confidence over the years and took control of the company after Mr Lee’s departure.
For their part, Mr Lee’s sons stated their faith in their father and urged him to maintain the leadership of the family business as much as possible. “I will be the first to ask him not to retire,” Peter Lee told South China Morning Post in 2001.
The feeling was in line with the intense sense of the piety of Mr Lee. In 1996, he built a four -storey mausoleum, which was completed with a tower integrated with semiplastic stones, in an acre in the ancestral village of Daliang of his family, southern Delta of the Pearl River. He buried his parents there.
Ashes They contributed reports.
