‘I want to get things done’: Billionaire Kwek Leng Beng on why it’s better to work hard and talk less

Billionaire Kwek Leng Beng is notoriously impatient.

He is also known to arrive very early for meetings, and expects others to be early too. Appearing 20 minutes before the stipulated time is not uncommon for him.

Suitably warned, my team and I are at the restaurant one full hour before our noon lunch date with him.

But he is, by his standards, “late”.

The hotelier and property tycoon arrives at Orchard Hotel at 11.58am, chauffeured in a plush red Mercedes-Maybach saloon.

At 82, he is thinner than in the photos I’ve seen of him. He walks slowly and with care, but his manner – and tongue – are sharp.

His answers are short and he makes no attempt to be charming. It is hard work to tease a smile out of him.

But over a lunch that stretches past two hours, I discover that this gruffness is actually his charm. What you see is what you get. There are no PR niceties, no artifice. And if he is a little tetchy at times, you are inclined to forgive it, given his list of accomplishments. 

Mr Kwek is executive chairman of the privately held Hong Leong Group, a conglomerate with gross assets of more than $40 billion. Its core businesses are property development, hotels, financial services and trading (among other things, it sells ready-mixed concrete and distributes Yamaha motorcycles).

He is also executive chairman of Singapore-listed real estate company City Developments Limited (CDL), which is behind such Singapore landmarks as Republic Plaza and The Sail @ Marina Bay.

His father, Mr Kwek Hong Png, started the Hong Leong Group in 1941. By the time the patriarch died in 1994, aged 83, he was said to have a $3 billion fortune. 

Few would argue that the founder’s elder son, who joined Hong Leong in 1963, has taken the family fortunes to new heights. Forbes’ 2023 list of richest people in Singapore puts Mr Kwek Leng Beng and his family at No. 5 with a net worth of US$11 billion (S$14.9 billion). 

Beginning with one hotel in Singapore in 1970, the group’s global network now spans 155 hotels, including those under Millennium & Copthorne Hotels.

When Mr Kwek bought into CDL in 1969, it was a small property player. Today, it can boast of having developed more than 50,000 homes and owning over 21 million sq ft of commercial space globally.

Orchard Hotel, where we are dining, is one of nine hotels he owns in Singapore. The others include the high-end St Regis and W Singapore. A 10th hotel, the upmarket Singapore Edition, opens soon.

He has chosen to eat at Cantonese restaurant Hua Ting, which he frequents. As he makes his way to a private dining room, employees stop in their tracks to respectfully greet him. I hear a chorus of “Good afternoon, chairman”.

We are joined at lunch by Mr Gerry de Silva, Hong Leong Group’s head of group corporate affairs, who has been with the company since 1995.  

The restaurant has prepared a menu of the boss’ favourite dishes. The ingredients are top-notch but the portions modest.

We start with an appetiser comprising about five slices of crispy roasted chicken and two tiny cubes of roasted pork, then move on to double-boiled chicken soup with sea whelk and Yunnan matsutake mushroom. 

The main dish is steamed eel in black bean sauce, and dessert is double-boiled peach resin with red dates, snow fungus and pear.

I’m a fast eater but notice that my guest is even faster. 

Strictly Business

Mr Kwek has deliberately kept a low profile all these years but has been persuaded by his people to be interviewed ahead of the launch of his authorised biography on Thursday.

The 225-page Strictly Business: The Kwek Leng Beng Story is written by Peh Shing Huei, a founding partner of content agency The Nutgraf, and is a brisk account of the tycoon’s business philosophy and milestones. 

One wishes there were more details of Mr Kwek’s corporate deals, but as the author notes in the introduction, the businessman “seems to detest post-action analysis”. 

The book says that one of his favourite mantras is “work hard, talk less, do more”.

It is true he is a man of action rather than words, Mr Kwek admits. “I’m a boss who says nothing very much but gets things done.”

He has no quarrel with his reputation for being impatient. “It’s because I want to get things done,” he reiterates. 

Business proposals should be short, “a few sentences”. He has no time for employees who push concepts like KPIs (key performance indicators) without understanding whether they can be executed practically. In fact, he tells me, his instruction concerning one such employee was: “Terminate her. This person is too academic.”

He gets on best with those “who share the same vision, who can understand what I want to do, and who are not long-winded”.

I joke that I should probably keep my questions snappy.

“Oh, you’re welcome to ask questions,” he says, a rare hint of a smile appearing.

He doesn’t waste hours mulling over whether to embark on a project. “Either you can do it or you cannot do it.”

He says passion for the job, and experience gained from years working on and understanding the ground, are reasons for his success.

The ability to get on with things applies also to recovering from business mistakes. “If the mistake is big, you don’t cry over it. You get on with it, make more money to cover the loss. That’s my philosophy.”

I venture to ask if he is similarly impatient at home, say, with his grandchildren?

“Yes,” he says without hesitation. “I do not often see my grandchildren. When I see them, I play with them and maybe after 10 minutes, I’m tired because they cannot talk business to me, much as I love them.”

His elder son Sherman, CDL’s group chief executive, has a daughter. His second son Kingston, a private investor not in the family business, has two sons and a daughter.

Like father, like son

Much of Mr Kwek’s hard-driving approach to life and business was inherited from his father.

Mr Kwek Hong Png came to Singapore from Fujian, China, in 1928 when he was a teenager, and worked as a store hand in his brother-in-law’s hardware business. By the mid-1930s, he was running the show. 

In 1941, he started his own trading company. He named it Hong Leong, which connotes bountiful harvests. During the Japanese Occupation, he bartered shipping ropes from Singapore for rice from Thailand, and bought property. This included a bungalow in Buckley Road in Newton, where Mr Kwek and his cousins grew up.

Mr Kwek Hong Png brought his three brothers, who had also come to Singapore, into the business. They were Hong Khai, Hong Lye and Hong Leong (this brother’s name and the company name have different Chinese characters).

The patriarch gave his three brothers a 65 per cent stake in the business, keeping the rest himself. Mr Kwek Hong Lye’s son, Mr Quek Leng Chan, 81, heads the Hong Leong empire in Malaysia.

After the war, the Hong Leong company expanded into shiphandling, building and construction materials and rubber.

Mr Kwek was born in 1941, one of two children from Mr Kwek Hong Png’s first wife, who died during the Japanese Occupation. He has an older sister and a brother –

the late Kwek Leng Joo

– and two sisters from his father’s second wife.

School was just something the quiet, obedient boy had to go through before he joined the family business. At Beatty Primary and Bartley Secondary schools, he wasn’t involved in many activities. “My father never encouraged me to study hard. He said, ‘You study too much, you become an academic. In the end you cannot do business’.”

But he did go on to study law at the University of London and gain certification as a chartered secretary. 

In Britain, he kept his younger cousins, who were also studying there and with whom he shared an apartment, in line. “If they went to a Chinese restaurant, I would smell their overcoats full of Chinese food smells. I said, ‘You went to a Chinese restaurant and spent a lot of money. You cannot, you are a student, you study’.”

You couldn’t have been very popular with them, I remark.

“They called me Hitler,” he deadpans. “When I went home, they said, ‘Independence. Independence’,” he adds, raising his left fist in a freedom gesture. He seems to relish telling this story.

In 1967, his father put him in charge of the newly set-up Hong Leong Finance, which served smaller businesses.

Mr Kwek Hong Png was a harsh boss who would berate his son for lacking business sense. “He always said, ‘You better learn from me. Seize opportunities’. He didn’t explain why things had to be done a certain way. You would have to analyse it yourself. On reflection, that was a good lesson for me. You learn through hardship, experience.”

The young Mr Kwek grew Hong Leong Finance aggressively, and it was listed in Singapore and Malaysia in 1969.

His foray into property development started in 1969 with the purchase of a stake in CDL, then a small, loss-making listed company. He paid 43 cents a share, defying his father’s order to buy it at 42 cents. Another scolding ensued, but he had the last laugh. In 1972, Hong Leong Group took control of the company and built it into a major developer.

He takes pride in the architecture of CDL’s buildings. “Our building designs are not cheap and boxy. They’ve got shape, like a lady with beautiful shape.”

His hotel empire has its roots in King’s Hotel, now Copthorne King’s, which opened in 1970. Hong Leong won a tender to build the hotel in Havelock Road on land that cost $980,000. The land is valued at $160 million today.

He spent nights at the lobby checking out the business. “That’s how I became an expert.” His wife Cecilia, a Malaysian-born lawyer, would tag along.

In 1990, Mr Kwek succeeded his father as chairman of Hong Leong Group. Soon after, he started buying up hotels and hotel chains in London, New Zealand and New York. Acquiring the Regal chain in 1999 gave him 47 hotels in the United States in one fell swoop.

Then there was the Plaza Hotel in New York. In 1995, he and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal teamed up to buy the landmark from Donald Trump. They sold it for US$675 million in 2004, double the US$325 million they had paid.

Passion to achieve

I wonder if making more money has been a key motivation. “It’s not a key. Making money is the result of achievement. But it’s not making money alone that I was going for. I have the passion to do this, to do this, to do that,” he says, punching the air for emphasis.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing, of course. During the Sept 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York City, one of his hotels, the Millenium Hilton, was badly damaged. Luckily, it was structurally safe and reopened two years later.

More recently, in financial year (FY) 2020, CDL 

booked a $1.78 billion impairment

 on its investment in China’s Sincere Property Group and posted a net loss of $1.9 billion for the year.

The Sincere deal was helmed by Mr Kwek’s son, Sherman, and

led to the departure of some directors,

including a cousin. The Hong Leong Group holds a controlling stake in CDL and the episode was said to have created a rift in family ties.

Asked about this, Mr Kwek says the deal was made with the best intentions of giving CDL a large stake in China. But the partner turned out to be not what CDL had thought.

His approach to the staggering loss has been: “Don’t keep on crying over spilt milk. You go on, you’ve learnt your lesson.” He still believes China is a big country that can’t be ignored, but doing business there isn’t easy. 

CDL posted an $85 million net profit in FY2021, followed by a record profit of $1.3 billion in FY2022. Net profit for the first half of FY2023 fell 94 per cent to $66.5 million compared with the previous corresponding period.

Is it important that your business remains in the family?

“Of course,” he says. “In Asia, family businesses, if they are successful, they are kept for a long time.”

Of the saying that family businesses don’t last beyond three generations, he says this depends on whether family members can agree. “Not all the time everyone agrees. But if you have a structure, you have demonstrated you can make profits for everyone, they should shut up, don’t talk too much.”

He adds, a tad wearily: “It’s not easy handling families.”

Retirement, however, is not on the cards. His mind is constantly on growing the business and he still gets a thrill from cutting difficult deals. “Where people cannot achieve, I can achieve.”

Most of his friends are business executives, and while he used to play golf, he now plays tennis with a coach. He doesn’t gamble, drinks just gin and tonic, and flies commercially as he doesn’t trust the safety of private jets.

I ask him what’s on his schedule for the rest of the day. He says he’s looking forward to listening to some jazz at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront in Havelock Road (another of his hotels) in the evening.

We wrap up the meal and I sense a bustle in the restaurant as employees prepare to see him out. “Thank you, chairman,” they chorus.

l tell him that, having read his biography, I was struck by how hard he has worked all his life.

“I enjoy working,” he says, and I believe he smiles.