Li & Fung: A source to be reckoned with

William Fung Kwok-lun was not always destined for the glossy pages of Forbes Magazine. A quiet life in academia was where the 65-year-old once envisioned himself, despite being one of only two heirs to Li & Fung, arguably Hong Kong's oldest and best-known local trading company.

At the Cheung Sha Wan nerve centre of the listed empire that his grandfather, Fung Pak-liu, co-founded in 1906, the company's chairman spoke with the South China Morning Post about himself, the family and the business.

"There was an academic streak in both my elder brother Victor [Fung Kwok-king] and me. After graduating from Harvard Business School, I was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, for a doctorate in economics," Fung says.

"This was the early '70s, during the Vietnam war, and getting a work visa [as a foreigner] wasn't an easy task. I wanted to get a job in the United States, but it was my mother who called us up and said one of us had better come back and help father as he was working himself to death."

So the Fung brothers devised a plan: Victor would stay in the US to teach and William would go back to join the family business. After two years, they would swap places. "Unfortunately, after two-years of working, I found out I had lost a lot of the skills I needed to become an economist," Fung says with a chuckle.

The man comes across as modest and frank despite having an estimated net worth of US$2.6 billion, making him 17th on Forbes' list of Hong Kong's richest people.