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Bin gerade im Info-Wahn: Interview und Visionen von und mit Richard Li: http://cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/technology/99/1203/index.htm… DECEMBER 3, 1999 VOL. 25 NO. 48 Star Power Richard Li`s plan to deliver the Internet via satellite to Asia excites investors -- and energizes Hong Kong By STEPHEN VINES more: Timeline: Li and his deals Perhaps more than any other vehicle among Asia`s newly minted Internet companies, Pacific Century Cyberworks is the embodiment of the momentary triumph of form over substance. In existence for about six months, the budding techno-conglomerate holds no patents, has yet to launch an information technology product or service, and its tangible Web presence is nothing more than a slow-loading, rather uninteresting corporate homepage. Until recently, Pacific Century CyberWorks (PCCW) was known mainly as the vessel for a controversial proposal to build, with generous government assistance, a $1.7 billion office and residential community meant to draw geeks to Hong Kong -- the Cyber-port. Yet the company is already one of the largest on Hong Kong`s stock exchange with a market capitalization of roughly $6.8 billion. It is the unofficial champion of Hong Kong`s wished-for ascendance as a regional center for Internet and e-commerce activity. There`s a reason for this. His name is Richard Li Tzar-kai. He is the founder and chairman of PCCW. He is also the second son of Superman -- Superman being the nickname of Hong Kong`s most influential billionaire, Li Ka-shing. Offspring of the Man of Steel-and-Glass Office Towers can be assumed to have impeccable business connections and implicit access to a large honey-pot. That alone can inspire confidence among investors. But Richard Li, 33, has other, more interesting dimensions. Indeed, he has spent most of his adult life trying to distance himself from his father`s (and when his father retires, his older brother Victor`s) operations at Hutchison Whampoa, the largest of the Li family holdings. An excellent way to draw an icy silence from Li is to mention the "F" word -- for father -- during a serious conversation (he was not available to be interviewed for this story). Li`s fierce drive to make his own way in the world compelled him while in his early 20s to start his own pan-Asian satellite TV network. When, at age 26, he sold the STAR network to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch for $950 million, Li had already begun to secure a reputation he could call his own. Although critics point out he has yet to build a profitable company, Li`s has been a short but happy business career. Last year, Time magazine ranked him 30th in its global list of "The 50 Most Important People in Cyberspace." Although he tells friends he prefers to associate with fellow Asians, he moves among the world`s famous and powerful. He has a tendency to name-drop, as in "I was talking to [U.S. Vice President] Al Gore the other day . . ." But associates explain that mentioning his contacts is so natural, he doesn`t realize others could find it off-putting. In his public and private life, he surrounds himself with the trappings of Hong Kong royalty -- butler in the office, an American social secretary, two flashy yachts, a private plane and apartments in places such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Toronto. He is frequently seen in the company of intelligent, accomplished, attractive women. Fortune magazine once called him "Asia`s Most Eligible Bachelor." His father used to introduce him to leaders like Jiang Zemin, China`s President. Now he meets with them on his own. Much is owed to the Murdoch deal, which planted the seeds for Li`s latest vision, PCCW. Proceeds of the sale gave Li an estimated $350 to $400 million, capital he used to set up Pacific Century Group (PCG), the holding company for CyberWorks. In fact, though Li initially positioned PCG as a high-tech leader, its one technology venture was a flop. It involved a project to provide companies with satellite-based communications systems. The money-loser was rather quickly sold to Hutchison Whampoa; Li insisted that the reason for the sale was to avoid a conflict of interest between the two companies. Afterwards, Li focused for the next several years primarily on real estate projects in Toronto, southern China, Beijing and Tokyo. PCCW has real estate projects and holdings, and a high-tech investment arm, CyberWorks Ventures. But the centerpiece, called Pacific Convergence, is a bold plan to serve much of Asia and beyond with high-speed Internet access and other multimedia content, beaming digital bits to computers and TV sets over a hybrid network of satellites and existing cable-TV systems. Although the technology for the venture is technically feasible, analysts say assembling all the pieces poses an extremely difficult challenge; moreover, the prime targets are India and China, where few people use computers but the vast majority own TVs. So far, attempts elsewhere to deliver the Internet and interactive content via television sets have met stiff resistance in the marketplace. Yet the satellite/cable project is no Trojan Horse without soldiers, no mere Internet scheme without substance. Believers include Intel Corp., the world`s largest microprocessor company, which contributed $50 million. PCCW has also set up a joint venture with DaimlerChrysler`s aerospace division, which gives Pacific Convergence access to satellite bandwidth. Last month, PCCW purchased 23% of SoftNet, a U.S. company that is providing high-speed Internet services to cable-TV operators and satellite communications to American corporations -- giving PCCW access to expertise that will help it roll out its own services next year. Deals that will enable PCCW to transmit over existing cable networks in China are already being cut. "We`re building one of the biggest businesses on earth," says Alexander Arena, a former telecommunications regulator who is now PCCW`s group managing director. Pointing to recent partnerships and cross-investments in companies including CMGI, an Internet holding company whose other investors include Microsoft and Compaq, Arena calls PCCW "a candle which will attract a number of moths." And Li, adds Salomon Smith Barney e-commerce analyst Kaushik Shridharani, is "the lightning rod" that brings in the business. Those who work with him say he is keen for ideas, a sponge for knowledge, an inspired deal-maker. He surrounds himself with smart managers and keeps them with stock options, a rarity in Asian companies. "I have not seen anyone who treasures talent as much as he does and has the willingness to reward it," says Francis T.F. Yuen, deputy chairman of Pacific Century Group. But to understand Li`s sometimes paradoxical nature (as generous as he is to employees, he is also known to berate them; educated in computers, he spurns electronic gadgetry) it is necessary to look at his business-from-birth upbringing. As a little boy Richard used to sit silently with his brother at board meetings conducted, authoritarian style, by his father. At 13 he was packed off to high school in California where he mingled uneasily with classmates at the exclusive Menlo Park School in Silicon Valley. He continued his education at Stanford, where he received his undergraduate degree in computer engineering, after which he studied briefly at Harvard and the London Business School. From there, he marched straight into a job as an executive director at Gordon Capital, a small, aggressive investment bank in Toronto. (He was the youngest executive director at the firm in which his father had a stake.) Three years later, in 1990, his mother died suddenly, and Richard returned to Hong Kong to a job in the fund management department of Hutchison Whampoa. There he found himself working under Simon Murray, a tough ex-Foreign Legionnaire. Being No.2 to a non-family member was not much to Richard`s liking; tales of fights between the pair are corporate legend (Murray, who left the company before the two came to blows, is now on much better terms with Li and serves on the board of one of his companies). Li`s job of running Hutchison`s investment portfolio hardly matched his aspirations, and he kept an eye on the exits. The opportunity came when he was alerted to an unused orbiting satellite called WestarVI. In 1991, Li put the satellite to work when he founded STAR on the safe assumption that there was a demand for entertaining television in Asian homes. The initial investment for the satellite TV project was modest, by Li standards, at $62.5 million. By the time STAR was sold to Murdoch`s News Corp. in 1993, the company claimed to have reached 53 million homes in more than 50 countries. It was not making a cent and has not done so in the six years since it became part of News Corp. By inviting the 26-year-old onto his yacht Morning Glory to talk terms of the sale, Murdoch had every reason to think he would be making another killing. But after a six-hour Mediterranean cruise, most analysts awarded the victory to the novice (one insider claims it was Li Senior who saved his son from accepting a lesser offer and clinched the deal). Li`s publicity literature states that he turned a $125 million investment into an asset worth $950.5 million when the last tranche of the shares were sold to News Corp. in 1995. Yet these figures ignore the losses incurred during Li`s tenure. If they were factored in, the gap between the investment and the sale price would be smaller, but the profit would still be healthy. While running STAR, Li drove some of his colleagues to distraction. "Personally I couldn`t stand him," said the head of a company that supplied programming. "He was young, arrogant and full of himself without having much to be full about." The executive recalled an appointment at STAR headquarters in Hung Hom and how Li kept him waiting for an hour. When he was finally summoned, Li did not bother to look up from his desk. The fuming executive complained about the mistreatment and was dismissed by Li`s curt reminder: "don`t forget, I`m paying you money." It was no better for employees, who worked around the clock and lived in dread of the infamous "bark box" -- an intercom system over which Li would harangue anyone in range. "He drives himself the hardest," says Yuen. "I think he was a very determined person trying to make a very complex business work," said one of his advisers who observed him at close quarters during this time. "Some were able to hack that, some were not. In retrospect people can look back and say that some were driven to excel beyond their threshold." These days, everyone who works with Richard Li seems to agree he is less prone to the tantrums that made his management style notorious. He is certainly more mature and confident, but it would be difficult to call him less driven. In the past year, he has done more deals than most people could hope to do in a couple of lifetimes. PCCW has raised around $900 million and CyberWorks Ventures, the venture capital arm, is spending it fast. "Typically we see eight business plans a day," says Arena. "They are searching us out as partners." Among strategic investments: $27 million for a 25% stake in SilkRoute Holdings, a Singapore-based company involved in "Asianizing" brand-name U.S. Internet content such as CNET and MTV; a stake in Hong Kong entertainment portal StarEast; interests in online travel, auction and e-commerce sites. PCCW also has forged ties to Softbank, Japan`s sprawling Net conglomerate. "Richard Li is a good friend of our company," says Goto Junichi, chief executive of Softbank China Venture Investments Ltd. Li`s most controversial deal, however, is the Cyber-port. In closing it, he persuaded the government to not only do away with its traditional open-tender process for buying land, but also to offer up a prime piece of real estate without any up-front payment at all. Instead the SAR will get its money once the project starts generating revenues. Property companies were outraged by the apparent favoritism and critics scorned the project as a misguided, ultimately doomed attempt to re-create Silicon Valley. But its effect on the local business community was galvanic, touching off scores of copycat high-tech/real estate projects and Internet companies spun off from Hong Kong conglomerates. Before Cyber-port, Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa`s administration was taking heat for not doing enough to move Hong Kong into the information age. The deal was important enough to be a highlight of Hong Kong Financial Secretary Donald Tsang`s annual budget speech. After all, the anchor tenants included Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Softbank, among other industry leaders. Tsang said the project will boost the economy, create 12,000 jobs and push the territory toward its goal of becoming a regional information and technology hub. After the announcement, the heat died down. Given the surge in PCCW`s share price -- when the company was created in April, shares surged from less than 9 cents to more than $1.17 in a day -- it is clear that the investment community believes in Richard Li. A recent report from Credit Suisse First Boston says that the company "represents one of the best long-term ways to play the growth of the Asian Internet." The stock closed at 85 cents on Nov. 23. "We are a service company applying existing technology which is known and proven," says Yuen of the satellite/cable venture. "We are not taking a technical risk at all." But analysts say it`s uncertain whether the technology can be applied throughout the region, because existing infrastructure varies widely in suitability. According to a Merrill Lynch report, PCCW is already working with cable companies that own advanced fiber-optic networks capable of handling the bandwidth-intensive, two-way communications traffic the company proposes to send their way. But it`s unclear if systems reaching 110 million other households -- homes in India, homes in China -- have modern enough networks to partner with PCCW, the report states. Arena admits that "at this stage [PCCW] is a concept stock" -- one of hundreds of Internet-related ventures that have sprung up with little operating history, no profits, but big ideas. Li has the management team, the money, and the business pedigree. Now he must outrun the pack -- he intends to do that without Superman in tow. |
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| Autor (Datum des Eintrages): | Brad Pitty (04.02.00 21:56:22) |
| Beitrag: | 15 von 31 (ID:429500) |
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