Wong Toon King is living proof of who dares wins, Barry Porter writes

Wong Toon King is full of surprises, as Pacific Century CyberWorks' chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai has discovered at significant cost. Not until the ink was drying at a signing ceremony in which CyberWorks pledged to spend US$26.9 million on a 25.1 per cent stake in Mr Wong's SilkRoute Holdings did the Singapore Internet whizz tell Mr Li he had earlier come very close to getting his talents for free. Perhaps that's what you should expect from a former fencing champion. Mr Wong revealed to the crowd when the deal was being formally announced that in 1994 he had applied to work for Star TV, a company then owned by Mr Li. Mr Wong flew to Hong Kong for an interview and was offered a position in its international business development division. He turned it down at the last minute. 'This guy is always surprising me,' said Mr Li, cringing at his missed opportunity. 'It would have been an awful lot cheaper that way.' As it turned out, soon after Mr Li sold Star TV to media magnate Rupert Murdoch and used the proceeds to buy Singapore-listed Pacific Century Regional Developments, from which Hong Kong Internet investment and property group CyberWorks was later born. Most of Mr Li's key executives migrated from Star to the Pacific Century Group, where many remain today. Mr Wong said his change of heart was because it suddenly dawned on him that the future of media was not in satellite broadcasting after all, but this new medium called the Internet which was just becoming commercially viable. In 1994, Yahoo! and Netscape were just being founded in the United States. It would now appear that Mr Li had been thinking along the same lines - not that Mr Wong realised it at the time. Five months later, Mr Wong quit a promising career with Singapore's National Computer Board (NCB) to set up his own tiny Internet firm. 'I paid myself S$500 [about HK$2,334] a month to cover my handphone and my petrol,' he said. 'Sometimes I didn't have enough money for my petrol so I would put it into neutral to go down hills to save some petrol. 'I slept on the office floor. But I was very excited about the future.' Mr Wong and Mr Li's paths did not cross again until September 8. A mutual friend thought they were like-minded and shared the same vision, so arranged for them to meet in Silicon Valley in the United States. They nurtured dreams of pioneering the Internet in Asia, though one out of Hong Kong and the other Singapore. Both were young, Mr Wong 33 and Mr Li 32. Both have been broadband pioneers in their respective countries. And both were recently named among Asiaweek magazine's top 20 Asian business and finance leaders for the millennium. On October 8 their two firms were married. Mr Wong says he was surprised how well he hit it off with Mr Li. 'I heard that he was very arrogant and brash,' said Mr Wong. 'When I first saw him five years ago that was probably true. 'But I feel he has changed. He has mellowed. I like his style. 'He wears no tie and carries a back-pack. It is refreshing in Asia.' CyberWork's Internet investment arm CyberWorksVentures agreed to pay US$26.9 million for an initial 25.1 per cent stake in privately held SilkRoute and has an option to invest US$6.6 million for an additional 4.9 per cent. Having grown from humble beginnings five years ago, SilkRoute today owns some of Singapore's most promising Internet firms. The jewel in its crown is business-to-business e-commerce provider Advanced Manufacturing Online (AMO), which services supply-chain management needs for electronics manufacturers. It is today one of the world's three largest Internet providers in this fast-growing specialist field, with multi-national customers such as Sony, Matsushita, Motorola, NEC and Philips. By the end of the year, AMO expects to be handling US$1 billion worth of orders a year. SilkRoute's AMO stake has shrunk to 38 per cent, having taken in 3i, Goldman Sachs, AsiaTech, Doll Capital and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter as venture capital partners. 'In the course of the next 18 months, SilkRoute aims to incubate and spin off more than 10 on-line businesses which may well, as has been the case with AMO, prove to be among Singapore's hottest Internet companies,' said Mr Wong. CyberWorks and SilkRoute intend to work in partnership, identifying, nurturing and occasionally co-investing in promising Internet start-ups at an early stage. SilkRoute's ventures will be encouraged to offer their services through CyberWorks' broadband portal and, where appropriate, locate their North Asia offices at its Cyber-Port hi-tech hub in Pokfulam. Mr Wong said: 'This partnership offers significant advantages. Hong Kong's Cyber-Port is a visionary infrastructure project which will provide SilkRoute with a strategic launching pad into North Asian markets. 'At the same time, PCCW [CyberWorks], through SilkRoute, has a strong platform in Singapore for expansion into South Asia.' After a year of media hype over fierce Hong Kong-Singapore rivalry, Mr Wong saw this as an example of how the two can complement one another and co-operate. 'I think this partnership is the beginning of closer ties between the two,' said Mr Wong. 'I think the private sector must take the leadership in forging ties between Asia south and Asia north, because we are too interdependent and must make things work together.' Mr Wong and Mr Li may now have a lot in common, but their backgrounds could not have been more different. As everyone in Hong Kong knows, Mr Li's was privileged, having been born to the territory's richest man. Mr Wong relied on winning a government scholarship to go to university at the age of 17, though admittedly to one of the world's finest, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, where he majored in computer science and engineering. 'I tried not to study too hard. I spent a lot of time fencing, five hours a day actually,' he said. 'I won a lot of medals and was captain of my fencing team.' He also minored in Japanese and economics, and did research at MIT's business school. 'I wanted a well-rounded education, not be just as a computer geek,' he said. However, this meant that while other Singapore government scholars were getting regular A and A+ grades, he was getting Bs. 'Every semester I had to send a note back to the government explaining why I didn't do as well as many of my colleagues,' he said. On returning to Singapore, it was pay-back time. After completing his three-year compulsory national military service, Mr Wong joined the NCB, having been bonded to work for the government for a further eight years in return for his free overseas education. At the NCB, he was appointed the first IT architect on Singapore's IT2000 intelligent island project, tasked with translating parliament's vision into reality. IT2000 subsequently spawned Singapore One, today the world's first nationwide broadband Internet and cable-television network. Despite helping mastermind such an exciting project, after 4.5 years, Mr Wong concluded a bureaucrat's life was not for him. 'I felt that government can only do so much. To make the information highway vibrant, ordinary people needed to take some risks and have ideas,' he said. 'It should not be centrally planned.' The real turning point was an MIT reunion, when Mr Wong was ruing with former classmates the fact that the big personal computer industry boom had come too early for their generation and wondering what would be the next big thing. After initially flirting with the idea of entering the satellite TV business, the potential magic of the Internet dawned. 'I decided the Internet was the next silk road,' he said. 'If I had stayed sitting at the NCB for the full eight years, I would have seen the whole revolution pass me by,' he said. Mr Wong paid off the remaining S$100,000 of his government bond and SilkRoute was born. Operating out of his small fencing school, his first experiment was AsiaOnline, a hip Internet content provider for younger people, providing a forum for alternative views which carried interviews with such contrarians as Singapore opposition leader Joshua Jeyaretnam and Hong Kong business rebel Jimmy Lai Chee-ying. It later foundered from lack of advertising support. (A completely separate Hong Kong Internet service provider of the same name continues to this day.) Joined by fencing friends Felix Tan, Mak Chee Wah and Karpal Singh, SilkRoute found more success in the Web-page design and development business. Today, SilkRoute employs more than 200 people, has launched three Internet companies and is incubating seven new ventures. The most established is AMO, which hopes to list in Singapore next year. Tricast, which is an Internet content provider for the mainland, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, also hopes to go public next year. Its CNet portal localises branded global Web sites, such as MTV Asia Online, and has Intel Venture Capital, Viacom and GE Capital as backers. The group's Web development arm Latitude Web, has a blue-chip roster of clients, including Singapore Airlines, StarHub, Tiger Beer and Singapore Tourism Board. Wong Toon King, 33, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. He spent four years at Singapore's National Computer Board. In 1994, he founded Internet services group SilkRoute Holdings. He is also chairman of e-commerce firm Advanced Manufacturing Online and co-founder of Web firm Tricast. Mr Wong, married with a daughter, has represented Singapore at fencing and owns a fencing school.