Exclusive | CK Asset is no longer a pure property company, a year after Victor Li takes over the flagship firm from ‘Superman’ dad
- Property sales, the entirety of Cheung Kong Property’s revenue when Li Ka-shing founded it in 1972, made up 45 per cent of CK Assets’ income last year
- The company has amassed a war chest of HK$60 billion for acquisitions, having spent HK$100 billion in 2017 and 2018 buying assets
Victor Li Tzar-kuoi had a surprise for shareholders last month when he announced the 2018 earnings of the flagship company founded by his father: he paid the highest dividend growth among Hong Kong’s listed property developers.
For CK Asset Holdings, the record payout – even if its core profit missed consensus estimate – was the culmination of a three-year restructuring that transformed one of the city’s best-known developers into one of Asia’s largest conglomerates, with operations spanning energy, global infrastructure and aircraft leasing.
“CK Asset is like a private-equity fund now, like Canada’s Brookfield [Asset Management],” the 120-year-old company with US$330 billion of assets under management, said Jonas Kan, head of Hong Kong research at Daiwa Capital Markets. “They are huge, they look for investment opportunities across the risk-return spectrum, with more exposure on real estate and infrastructure.”
The transformation – driven by over HK$100 billion (US$12.7 billion) of acquisitions in 2017 and 2018 – increased the conglomerate’s recurring revenue to over 50 per cent last year, compared with 2016, said Gerald Ma Lai-chee, CK Asset’s general manager of corporate business development.