Billionaire profile: Pan Sutong

Pan Sutong, the chairman of Goldin Properties Holdings, can seem like a character out of place and time. Hobnobbing with royalty, playing polo on his own grounds, quaffing HK$2,700 bottles of Bordeaux, Pan lives a life that would not seem out of place in Gilded Era America or Ancien Régime France.

Born in 1963 in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, Pan came of age during the Cultural Revolution, which plunged China into chaos as Red Guards sought to rid the country of everything that was capitalist or "feudal". Pan was raised by his paternal grandmother until her death from cancer when he was 13.

Ironically, for a man who would become synonymous with the nouveau riche hyper-consumption that characterises modern Chinese capitalism, Pan completely missed the reforms which created it. In 1976, he was sent to California to live with his step-grandmother.

Pan was an underachiever educationally and often skipped classes. He never graduated high school or picked up much English. In 1984, he returned to China, using a loan from his family to set up a business in Hong Kong, Matsunichi Colour Display Monitor, specialising in selling Japanese electronics.

From distribution, Pan moved into manufacturing, and within 10 years Matsunichi commanded about 90 per cent of the production of karaoke monitors for the mainland's booming KTV market.

In 2002, Pan entered the Hong Kong stock exchange for the first time, taking over Emperor Technology Venture and renaming it Matsunichi Communication Holdings. In 2008, the company acquired another listed firm, and was renamed Goldin Financial Holdings, dropping the faux-Japanese name for a more international brand.