A female touch to the family business

Sonia Cheng Chi-man's profile really took off after her elderly grandfather Cheng Yu-tung laid out his retirement plan.

In February, Cheng Yu-tung, the founder of New World Development, one of Hong Kong's biggest property companies, announced he was stepping down and handing the reins to the second and third generations of Chengs. His son, managing director Henry Cheng Kar-shun, succeeded him as chairman on March 1, and Henry's son Adrian Cheng Chi-kong, already an executive director, was assigned to oversee the overall operations of the group. As part of the succession plan, Sonia, Henry's 31-year-old daughter, took on a more prominent role in the group and promoted to be an executive director of New World Development, whose businesses span infrastructure, telecommunications, real estate and hotels.

She is also chief executive of New World Hospitality, a division that has a worldwide portfolio of 27 hotels under three separate hotel management brands. (Separately, New World Development has ownership interests in 18 hotels in Hong Kong, mainland China and Southeast Asia that are managed by such brands as Hyatt and Marriott.)

While her brief as a company director calls for her to help oversee the group, Sonia's heart is really in the hospitality industry.

Armed with a degree from Harvard University, where she studied mathematics, she joined New World Hospitality in 2008 and became chief executive three years later at the age of 29. Since then, she has presided over the division's aggressive expansion.

Besides its New World brand, which operates business hotels in first- and second-tier Chinese cities, the hospitality division owns Pentahotels, a European chain it acquired in 2001. That was followed in July last year by the purchase of the management unit of Texas-based hotelier Rosewood Hotels & Resorts for US$229.5 million. The plan is for Rosewood to be the ultra-luxury brand in the division's portfolio.