Thursday, July 14, 2016
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Robert Kuok – The world’s shrewdest businessman
Kuok Cools on China as Tycoon Exits Hong Kong Media
Traditional Asian business leaders appear to be giving way to homegrown Chinese billionaires hungry for acquisitions.
Robert Kuok's move to sell Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to Chinese Internet giant Alibaba may be the start of a new trend of tycoons selling their assets in China.
HONG KONG—Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok, built his fortune by transforming his father’s sugar-trading business into a property-to-logistics empire focused on China, securing prime real estate after being an early foreign investor and loyal friend to Beijing.
Now, Mr. Kuok’s decision to sell his media assets in the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reflects a potential changing of the guard as traditional Asian tycoons, whose investments helped forge China’s economic success, give way to a new breed of homegrown, acquisition-hungry billionaires who come from within the Chinese system.
The 92-year-old Mr. Kuok has also considered selling some of his real-estate holdings in China and Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said, as a slowing economy and rising competition have weighed on results. Profit fell last year at seven publicly traded companies in Mr. Kuok’s portfolio, although most saw an upturn in the first half of this year.
Mr. Kuok’s flagship Kerry Properties Ltd. has cut back the amount of property under development in China every year since 2012, according to company filings. Separately, Mr. Kuok’s luxury hotel chain, Shangri-La, has been impacted in China by lower revenue amid a persistent anticorruption campaign, with profits slumping 54% last year to $181 million. Increasingly, Shangri-La is opening in locations further afield, from London to Istanbul, and is planning more openings in India, the Philippines, Qatar and Sri Lanka.
Mr. Kuok’s companies are also building up their networks in Africa and Oceania, including constructing a large, mixed-use development near the airport in Accra, Ghana. The shift to a more global focus is reminiscent of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, whose downsizing of his exposure to China and Hong Kong in favor of billion-dollar assets in Europe stirred criticism from China’s media earlier this year.
“You should see quite a number of Hong Kong businessmen trimming their China businesses in the next year or two, because profitability in China is declining,” said Eric Huang, partner of property-investment firm HCG Capital Partners, who has worked with wealthy Hong Kong families.
However, older tycoons with long-held investments in China are likely to sell at a measured pace, analysts say, wary of being seen to be reducing support for China. Mr. Kuok is likely to remain heavily committed to China, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Mr. Kuok and the Kerry Group companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Over the past few years, new Chinese billionaires have increasingly sought assets outside of mainland China as they look to diversify and broaden their investments. One of the more high-profile acquisitions in recent years has been U.S. theater chain AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which was purchased by Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group in 2012. Some mainland billionaires are taking Chinese assets off the hands of Hong Kong tycoons. Earlier this month, Hong Kong billionaire Cheng Yu-tung’s New World China Land sold three Chinese property projects to mainland billionaire Xu Jiayin’s Evergrande Group.
By investing in logistics and infrastructure in Southeast Asia and Africa, Mr. Kuok is also tapping into Beijing’s more recent plans. The government wants to grow Chinese companies overseas and increase trade and influence through its “One Belt, One Road” initiative that spans dozens of countries as far as Europe.
Mr. Kuok’s firms are now reapplying his China strategy in other emerging markets, brokers and analysts said.
“They assist the local government and its people in developing the cities,” said Terence Tang, managing director at Collier International Capital Markets in Asia, who has worked with the Kuok family. “Thus, they are very much welcomed by the governments from these emerging markets.”
Mr. Kuok initially built his empire on sugar, as tycoons in Southeast Asia focused on traditional industries such as commodities, shipping and infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. He first advised Chinese leaders how to resolve a sugar shortage in 1973, according to an academic paper written by Malaysian professors. When Deng Xiaoping announced economic reforms in the late 1970s, Mr. Kuok was among the first tycoons to invest in China.
Mr. Kuok is known for developing close relationships with political leaders, including Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew, said Lee Poh Ping, a professor at the University of Malaysia who has studied the tycoon.
Mr. Kuok began developing the landmark China World Trade Center in Beijing in the mid-1980s, now one of many flagship developments in prime locations in first-tier cities. After some foreign businesses pulled out of China and Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when the army violently crushed student protests, Mr. Kuok continued to invest in China as a political statement to show that he wasn’t worried about the country, Mr. Lee said.
In 1993, Mr. Kuok expanded into Hong Kong’s media industry by purchasing a stake in the publisher of the English-language South China Morning Post from News Corp., parent of The Wall Street Journal. The paper proved to be a cash cow in the 1990s, stacked with company notices, job listings and advertisements. He bought a bigger stake in the company in 2007.
Managing the South China Morning Post, however, has gotten more complicated in recent years, as anti-Beijing tensions have flared up in Hong Kong and the Internet has decimated traditional advertising revenues. The newspaper has been blamed by Western media-watchers for not being tough enough on Beijing, yet at the same time, it has been blocked in China for coverage disapproved of by Chinese authorities.
“The newspaper has declined in the past few years,” said Ying Chan, director of Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong. “Robert Kuok was happy to sell.”
Mr. Kuok told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper in an interview last month that the sale was purely a “business decision.”
Write to Wei Gu at wei.gu@wsj.com and Wayne Ma at wayne.ma@wsj.com
Traditional Asian business leaders appear to be giving way to homegrown Chinese billionaires hungry for acquisitions.
Robert Kuok's move to sell Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to Chinese Internet giant Alibaba may be the start of a new trend of tycoons selling their assets in China.
HONG KONG—Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok, built his fortune by transforming his father’s sugar-trading business into a property-to-logistics empire focused on China, securing prime real estate after being an early foreign investor and loyal friend to Beijing.
Now, Mr. Kuok’s decision to sell his media assets in the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reflects a potential changing of the guard as traditional Asian tycoons, whose investments helped forge China’s economic success, give way to a new breed of homegrown, acquisition-hungry billionaires who come from within the Chinese system.
The 92-year-old Mr. Kuok has also considered selling some of his real-estate holdings in China and Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said, as a slowing economy and rising competition have weighed on results. Profit fell last year at seven publicly traded companies in Mr. Kuok’s portfolio, although most saw an upturn in the first half of this year.
Mr. Kuok’s flagship Kerry Properties Ltd. has cut back the amount of property under development in China every year since 2012, according to company filings. Separately, Mr. Kuok’s luxury hotel chain, Shangri-La, has been impacted in China by lower revenue amid a persistent anticorruption campaign, with profits slumping 54% last year to $181 million. Increasingly, Shangri-La is opening in locations further afield, from London to Istanbul, and is planning more openings in India, the Philippines, Qatar and Sri Lanka.
Mr. Kuok’s companies are also building up their networks in Africa and Oceania, including constructing a large, mixed-use development near the airport in Accra, Ghana. The shift to a more global focus is reminiscent of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, whose downsizing of his exposure to China and Hong Kong in favor of billion-dollar assets in Europe stirred criticism from China’s media earlier this year.
“You should see quite a number of Hong Kong businessmen trimming their China businesses in the next year or two, because profitability in China is declining,” said Eric Huang, partner of property-investment firm HCG Capital Partners, who has worked with wealthy Hong Kong families.
However, older tycoons with long-held investments in China are likely to sell at a measured pace, analysts say, wary of being seen to be reducing support for China. Mr. Kuok is likely to remain heavily committed to China, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Mr. Kuok and the Kerry Group companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Over the past few years, new Chinese billionaires have increasingly sought assets outside of mainland China as they look to diversify and broaden their investments. One of the more high-profile acquisitions in recent years has been U.S. theater chain AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which was purchased by Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group in 2012. Some mainland billionaires are taking Chinese assets off the hands of Hong Kong tycoons. Earlier this month, Hong Kong billionaire Cheng Yu-tung’s New World China Land sold three Chinese property projects to mainland billionaire Xu Jiayin’s Evergrande Group.
By investing in logistics and infrastructure in Southeast Asia and Africa, Mr. Kuok is also tapping into Beijing’s more recent plans. The government wants to grow Chinese companies overseas and increase trade and influence through its “One Belt, One Road” initiative that spans dozens of countries as far as Europe.
Mr. Kuok’s firms are now reapplying his China strategy in other emerging markets, brokers and analysts said.
“They assist the local government and its people in developing the cities,” said Terence Tang, managing director at Collier International Capital Markets in Asia, who has worked with the Kuok family. “Thus, they are very much welcomed by the governments from these emerging markets.”
Mr. Kuok initially built his empire on sugar, as tycoons in Southeast Asia focused on traditional industries such as commodities, shipping and infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. He first advised Chinese leaders how to resolve a sugar shortage in 1973, according to an academic paper written by Malaysian professors. When Deng Xiaoping announced economic reforms in the late 1970s, Mr. Kuok was among the first tycoons to invest in China.
Mr. Kuok is known for developing close relationships with political leaders, including Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew, said Lee Poh Ping, a professor at the University of Malaysia who has studied the tycoon.
Mr. Kuok began developing the landmark China World Trade Center in Beijing in the mid-1980s, now one of many flagship developments in prime locations in first-tier cities. After some foreign businesses pulled out of China and Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when the army violently crushed student protests, Mr. Kuok continued to invest in China as a political statement to show that he wasn’t worried about the country, Mr. Lee said.
In 1993, Mr. Kuok expanded into Hong Kong’s media industry by purchasing a stake in the publisher of the English-language South China Morning Post from News Corp., parent of The Wall Street Journal. The paper proved to be a cash cow in the 1990s, stacked with company notices, job listings and advertisements. He bought a bigger stake in the company in 2007.
Managing the South China Morning Post, however, has gotten more complicated in recent years, as anti-Beijing tensions have flared up in Hong Kong and the Internet has decimated traditional advertising revenues. The newspaper has been blamed by Western media-watchers for not being tough enough on Beijing, yet at the same time, it has been blocked in China for coverage disapproved of by Chinese authorities.
“The newspaper has declined in the past few years,” said Ying Chan, director of Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong. “Robert Kuok was happy to sell.”
Mr. Kuok told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper in an interview last month that the sale was purely a “business decision.”
Write to Wei Gu at wei.gu@wsj.com and Wayne Ma at wayne.ma@wsj.com
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Best marketing strategy ever! Steve Jobs Think different / Crazy ones speech
Brokop.com has made subtitles for this 1997 speech of Steve Jobs, because it has such bad sound quality and that is a pity because it is the best marketing speech in the world.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
The fascinating life of Elon Musk, captured in one giant infographic
A good overview of Elon Musk, the next Steve Job...
From getting bullied and thrown down the stairs in grammar school to becoming “Earth’s most future-oriented person” and earning billions of dollars in the process, it’s hard to wrap one’s brain around just how much Elon Musk has managed to stuff into his 44 years of life. But that’s where this massive infographic, created by information designer Anna Vital, comes in. Read the full article.
“In a hundred years, when most people reading this and the person writing this are long gone, Musk’s cars and rockets will still be circling the Earth and the skies,” writes Anna Vital from the Funders and Founders blog. “How can such a person get started against all odds is the question I ask here. And, more importantly, what can we learn from him?”
The illustrated life’s journey, which leans heavily on Ashlee Vance’s book, winds through several milestones and inflection points, like when Musk sold his first videogame and the time he left Stanford’s PhD program after just two days.
And, of course, it also mentions how Musk, after reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” decided his life’s mission would be to save humanity.
Those are just a few of the highlights. It’s a huge visualization , so we broke it down into some notable sections.
The rough early years, capped by a nice profit at the age of 12:
A youthful existential crisis and getting his hands dirty:
A formal education and some dues-paying:
Grappling with tragedy, pondering Tesla and making the bucks:
Still to come:
Still to come:
For now, Musk is basking in the glow of what looks to be a huge success with the upcoming Model 3, a more affordable Tesla TSLA, +1.05% aimed at the mass market. The company has already taken in hundreds of thousands of preorders for a car that won’t be delivered until 2017 at the earliest.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Saturday, March 5, 2016
WHAT MEDITATION DOES TO YOUR BRAIN
What meditation does to your brain? The benefits of meditation are well known. You get calmer, you can focus better, your stress levels are reduced and you can sleep better. But the benefits of meditation do not end there. This seemingly simple exercise of closing the eyes and tuning inwards can actually make lasting physical changes in your body. Specifically, it can literally change your brain!
What is Meditation
Let’s get one thing straight first. Meditation is not about thinking about nothing, or trying to quiet the mind so that there are absolutely no thoughts. Rather, meditation is about training the mind to focus, it’s about gaining awareness about the thoughts, and creating some distance between you and your thoughts. When you can observe your thoughts, and observe the reactions you have to your thoughts, you are getting to the point.
Training the Brain
The brain, like the rest of the body, is growing and developing all the time. Just like we can train the muscles in our body, we can also train the brain. Some time ago scientist thought that the brain is what it is after our childhood, but recently the miracles of neuro-plasticity are more known, and there are more and more research results for the ability for the brain to develop and change.
New connections in the brain
Grey matter is the part of the brain where the neurons are connecting to each other and this part is activated when we are learning new skills. When we meditate, we are stimulating growth of new brain cells, which means more grey matter. As we age, we are naturally losing some of the mass of the grey matter, but meditation is said to slow down this process.
Improved long term memory
Research has also found that this increase in grey matter forms in the hippocampus, the area of the brain that turns short term memories into long term memories, eg. helping us to learn and internalize new skills and information.
Keeping the emotions in control
Meditation affects the pre-frontal cortex of your brain, which is busy making decisions and analyzing life around you. This part of the brain is responsible for problem solving and regulating emotions. The more grey matter we have in this part of the brain, the better we are able to deal with our emotions and feelings.
Reacting less to stressors
One thing that reduces as we meditate, is the size of the stress centre of the brain, also called the amygdala. When we are stressing about something, this part of the brain is activated, and the so-called Fight-or-Flight response is initiated in the body. With meditation, we can reduce the activity of the amygdala, which means that we don’t get overly anxious and stressed about things for no apparent reason. When we meditate, also the connections between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex get weaker, which means that we get less reactive to stressful stimuli.
How much should we meditate?
To get all these wonderful effects of meditation, how much should we meditate? You can start with 5 minutes few times a day, and build up to 15-30 minutes daily.
Meditation and mindfulness bring a certain level of calmness into your life, and give you space to reflect on what is happening around you, instead of reacting continuously to every single stimulus that might pass you by (including your own thoughts). You are in better control of your thoughts, your emotions and your reactions, which makes you better able to navigate in life with a purpose, instead of just drifting from one sensation to the next. Well worth those few minutes a day, don’t you think?
13 things mentally strong people don't do - Business Insider
13 things mentally strong people don't do - Business Insider: GettyNavy SEALs possess extraordinary mental toughness.Mental strength isn't often reflected in what you do.It's usually seen in what you don't do.In her b
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