Lee Shau-Kee, a real estate mycoon in Hong Kong who made his immense fortune building tens of thousands of apartments for the middle class descendants of refugees who had fled the Communist mainland China, died on Monday. He was 97.
His death was announced by the company he founded, Henderson Land Development. It didn't say where he died or quoted a cause.
Until well into his 1970s, Mr. Lee became even richer through smart financial investments that led some people to call him Warren Buffett van Hong Kong. At his death, Forbes Magazine estimated its value to $ 29.2 billion, making him the 63rd richest person in the world.
Mr. Lee founded Henderson Development in 1976. By the time he abandoned in 2019 at the age of 91 as chairman and director, the company had grown to 10,000 employees and spread further than real estate development to hotels, department stores and natural gas distribution.
He started his career as a gold and currency dealer and reinvested his win in real estate. Most speculators and developers preferred more expensive suddenly on the island of Hong Kong. But Mr Lee was sure that the rising tide of hard -working, upward mobile refugees from the mainland and their descendants would send real estate prices. He took a chance and buy large pieces of cheap agricultural land in the new areas that borders on the mainland.
His business strategy, he said, was based on trends that indicate that wages are rising much faster than real estate prices, so that apartments were placed within the reach of hundreds of thousands of buyers and tenants. In the 1970s and '80s, Henderson Land Development founded the new city of Sha Tin, which became the home of more than half a million people.
“Young couples chose to live in their own house instead of their parents as they traditionally did,” Mr. Lee told his official biographer, Leung Fung-Yee.
Mr. Lee himself lived in one of the inconspicuous residential towers that built his company in Hong Kong and loved to spend his spare time with colleague magnates.
As his real estate company grew, Mr. Lee manned his management with family members, including his children and nieces and cousins. At least 10 of them held senior positions; Two sons, Peter and Martin, became joint presidents in 2019.
Mr. Lee has channeled most of his philanthropy through the Lee Shau-Kee Foundation, Financing buildings and fairs at universities in Hong Kong, China and other countries. The Foundation also financed vocational training for farmers and national doctors on mainland China.
Mr. Lee once considered making major investments abroad, he said, but finally decided to stay on the island. “The taxes are too high elsewhere,” he told Forbes in 1997 and noticed that he collected $ 340 million in tax -free dividends in 1996, so that the majority of this windfall was looked back in his real estate companies. “You couldn't snow your winnings.”
Lee Shau-Kee was born on January 29, 1928 in Shunde, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, in South China, to Lee Gai-Fu and Chan Luan-Fung. His father, a well-to-do currency trader, sent him to Hong Kong in 1948 when the Communists of Mao Zedong were about to prevail on the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek in the Chinese Civil War.
As a teenager, Mr. Lee a golden trader, first with his father and then alone. As an adult, he decided to move to Hong Kong and to get the development of real estate. He was co-founder of Sun Hung Kai Properties with two other partners in 1963 and started Henderson Land Development at his own 13 years later.
Henderson became a listed company in 1981, although a majority of its shares was owned by Lee family members.
Mr. Lee occasionally had business fallouts with his relatives, especially with his wife of 15 years, Lau Wai-Kuen, whom he separated in 1981. “I will not get married again because I am afraid that a woman would only see my money,” he told his biographer.
His survivors are his two sons, three daughters and his sister, Fung Lee Woon King, an executive director at Henderson Land Development.
Towards the end of the 20th century, economic and political trends undermined the real estate market in Hong Kong that Mr. Lee had pushed into the ranks of the world's richest people. Because China embraced capitalist reforms, foreign investors hurried to set up factories and offices on the mainland, and Shanghai challenged Hong Kong as the prominent financial capital of Asia. And with the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong and the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the island city lost part of its aura of a Freewheeing Business Center. With fewer companies that set up offices in Hong Kong, the local real estate market stagnated.
Mr. Lee's critics predicted the decline of his empire and called it a warning story about the dangers with which a company was confronted that his traditional organization had outgrown in the family.
“Lee Shau-Kee is typical of the generation of Chinese entrepreneurs after the Second World War in Asia,” said the economic review in the Far East in a long profile of him in 2001. Despite the building of a profitable empire in the midst of the unrest, the magazine, Mr. Lee “has had difficulties.
He proved that such Doomsayers were wrong with profitable investments in financial shares, derivatives and new companies such as paper production. His touch was so certain that he tried to hide his investment plans for speculators who tried to follow every movement.
At the same time, Mr. Lee became increasingly impatient with his heirs. In 1998 he told Hong Kong journalists that after a decade of guardianship in the family business, his eldest son, Peter, was not ready to succeed him. “He now only gets a passing figure,” said Mr. Lee.
At the 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 recovered his confidence over the years and took control of the company after Mr Lee welcomed.
For their part, the sons of Mr Lee claimed the loyalty to their father and encouraged him to maintain the leadership of the family business for as long as possible. “I will be the first to ask him not to retire,” Peter Lee told the South China Morning Post in 2001.
The sentiment was in accordance with Mr. Lee's own strong feeling of childish piety. In 1996 he built a four-storey mausoleum, garnished with a tower embedded with semi-belly stones, on a hectare in the ancestral village of Daliang of his family, in the Southern Pearl River Delta. He buried his parents there.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
