Setting growth in the right direction

Martin Cubbon, chief executive of Swire Properties, has had some exciting moments since he took up the job in 2009.

Among the high points were the sale of Festival Walk, a retail-office project in Kowloon Tong, for a record HK$18.8 billion and the listing of Swire Properties on the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier this year.

A chartered accountant, Cubbon, 54, joined the Swire group as internal audit manager at Cathay Pacific Airways in 1986.

Since then, he has served in a number of management roles across the group, including as a director of Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering, chairman of Swire Beverages and group finance director of parent Swire Pacific, where he has been a director since 1998.

Swire Properties set up its first representative office in Guangzhou in 2001. But rental income did not start to roll in until years later when its first project, Sanlitun Village - a 1.46 million square foot retail-hotel complex in Beijing - opened its doors in 2008.

Rental income from the mainland, mostly from Sanlitun Village, whose tenants include Apple and Adidas, and another office-retail complex in Guangzhou that opened last year named Taikoo Hui, accounted for nearly 14 per cent of the company's HK$4.9 billion turnover in the first half of this year.