Making their mark: younger generation of women from Hong Kong business families forge their own paths
- From preserved meats to darts and coffee, younger businesswomen do it their way
- Creativity, going online, embracing technology, among their secrets to success
After an absence of more than 30 years, the Kam Kook Yuen brand of Chinese cured meats and sausages is about to make a reappearance.
The company thrived for more than half a century, had a chain of about 10 restaurants that drew devoted crowds with its top-quality lap mei products, then shut down in 1997.
Now Kimmy Lai, 37, a member of the third generation in the family business, is ready to bring back its range of cured meats but this time, customers will have to go online to buy.
She guarded her grandfather’s recipes for years while running her own flourishing e-commerce business in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Now she is preparing to relaunch the family brand of pork and liver sausages, waxed duck and preserved meat for the Lunar New Year next month.
“For me, it will be OK to fail in other businesses, but not in my family business,” says Lai.
She is among a number of women from families with deep business roots in Hong Kong who are striking out with new enterprises, or putting their spin on the family’s core business.
The Post interviewed four women who have taken off from their family businesses, and were among about 30 winners of the 2019 Greater Bay Area Outstanding Women Entrepreneur Awards.
Family businesses play a significant role in Hong Kong’s economy. The 2016 global family business survey by multinational professional services network PwC showed that family businesses account for 60 to 66 per cent of the city’s private sector, and that the top 15 families controlled assets worth 84 per cent of gross domestic product.
The longevity of family businesses can be threatened by reluctance to innovate, a lack of succession planning and conflict among family members.
Most do not have succession plans, says Marshall Jen, project director of the Chinese University’s Centre for Entrepreneurship. “Only with clear objectives and targets can family businesses cultivate new leaders with capability to continue growing their business,” he says.
Since I was little, I never considered working for someone else. I always thought about setting up my own business
John Wong, PwC mainland China and Hong Kong family business and private client services leader, says family businesses need to go digital, diversify their operations, innovate and build corporate value to survive boom and bust cycles.
Lai, for one, is seizing the opportunities in today’s digitalised world to revamp her family’s preserved meats business.
Her grandfather, Lai Kwan, established Kam Kook Yuen in Hong Kong in 1924, serving Chinese pork sausages, liver sausages, cured duck and pork.
Her father, Lai Wai-kuen, helped to expand the business, counting ordinary people and tycoons among customers drawn by the taste and quality of the products. At its peak, the family owned more than 10 properties in prime locations for their restaurants and factories.
The business closed in 1997, after most of its shareholders left Hong Kong in the wave of emigration that occurred when Britain returned the city to China. Lai’s father remained, but switched to investing in property.
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Lai acquired an entrepreneurial spirit early. “Since I was little, I never considered working for someone else. I always thought about setting up my own business,” she says.
After graduating from the University of Queensland in Australia in 2000, majoring in e-commerce, her first ventures were related to modelling, fashion and jewellery design.
Then she set up an e-commerce platform in Taiwan, Moi Adore, offering electronic goods, clothes and food.
The loss of her father and sister to cancer, and her own bout of illness, made her realise the value of good health. She established the online platform DiVineed in Hong Kong in March this year, selling health care products and attracting more than 6,000 customers mostly in their 20s to 40s.
Her forays online got her seeing the internet as a way to revive the family’s lap mei business and avoid the city’s skyrocketing rents while also reaching new customers, including in mainland China.
“Over the years people, including our previous customers, have asked me to sell our lap mei products again,” Lai says. “We will restart on a small scale first, to bring back the original flavour and nostalgia, then see how we can expand.”
Given the lack of new blood in the industry, she has tracked down a lap mei maker in his 80s who once worked in her grandfather’s restaurant. He and his family will make the products by hand, according to the original recipes.
Creating a dart revolution
According to PwC, most next-generation family business leaders globally aim to leave their stamp and do something special with the business.
For Jennifer Tsui, 38, that has meant growing a darts venture out of her family’s hardware business manufacturing screws.
She worked in Germany and Belgium after graduating in 2007 from the ArtCenter College of Design in the United States, majoring in transportation design.
Her father, Edward Tsui, set up Shing Hing Industrial in 1977, making a fortune producing screws, fasteners and metal parts in his factory in the Guangdong manufacturing hub of Dongguan.
Then the company was hit by the 2008 global financial crisis, and Tsui returned the following year to help her father.
She headed to Dongguan and embarked immediately on transforming the factory. She abolished outdated systems, dissolved rampant workplace cliques, and made everything transparent and rule-based.
She introduced automation and mechanisation, and focused on innovation and design.
“The older generations attached importance to human relationships in business, whereas our generation looks at things in a more rational way,” she says. “I prefer to rely on systems and rules.”
Many people say there is only a small market for darts, but for me, the real market is among those who haven’t played it yet
Starting in sales, she worked her way up to become general manager and chief executive. Her efforts paid off, but she yearned for more.
“I was thinking about using our core skills and technologies to do something new,” she says.
She perked up when a former colleague pointed out that the technology and materials to make the barrels of darts were similar to manufacturing screws.
That led to her founding The Darts Factory in 2015. The company invented the world’s first weight-adjustable darts and portable electronic dartboards with LED lighting to make the sport more fun and interactive.
Tsui left her father’s company in 2018 to run her darts business separately, manufacturing at mainland factories including in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan.
Determined to make darts more than a pub game and expand her business on the mainland next year, she says: “Many people say there is only a small market for darts, but for me, the real market is among those who haven’t played it yet.”
From banking to cookery school
Unlike Tsui who ventured out from the family enterprise, Alvina Chan Yin-lam, 40, tried investment banking and pursued her passion in cooking before returning to the family business.
Her parents, Alvin and Fidelia Chan, run Ekpac China Limited, a Hong Kong-based company going back more than 100 years, providing various services including health care and agriculture technologies.
After graduating from Columbia University in New York in 2004, Chan became an investment banker.
But the global financial crisis in 2008 left her so frustrated and disillusioned that she took off for Paris, enrolled in the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and finished with a first place and distinction in French cuisine.
“I was in desperate search of a sense of purpose,” she says. “When I received my award on stage, I heard a sound whispering to me that I should use cooking to spread the message of love.”
In 2009, she founded Alvina Cookery to promote healthy cooking. She appeared on television programmes, ran cooking classes and wrote columns and books on healthy cooking.
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When she moved to her parents’ company in 2017, she found that Ekpac China had been promoting sustainability in the agricultural sector.
The company has introduced water-saving drip irrigation technology from Israel to water-scarce areas such as Ningxia and Gansu in mainland China.
She found a way to blend her two roles, as founder of Alvina Cookery and vice-chairman of Ekpac China, to work out her own career path.
She herself had been promoting the idea of food sustainability on her cookery platform. Now in her family business, she focuses on introducing new technologies to do more.
“Through food technologies, I can combine my business knowledge, financial know-how and interest in food,” she says.
Coffee the way to go
Jennifer Liu Wai-fun, 45, was born into a family of financiers and property developers but struck out on a different path to success.
Her grandfather Liu Po-shan founded a bank, while her billionaire parents Rita Tong Liu, ranked 25th in Forbes Hong Kong's 50 Richest 2019 list, and Thomas Liu Lit-ching set up real estate company Gale Well Group.
Cornell University architecture graduate Jennifer Liu took off from a favourite Sunday pastime of sipping coffee with her father to establish The Coffee Academics, one of Hong Kong’s most successful cafe brands.
“I was born and brought up knowing about entrepreneurship,” Liu says. “I respect my grandfather’s business, and I admire my parents’ business. But I have my own business as well.”
Liu recalls working at her father’s company for a while and finding the office work a bit boring. “I knew I needed a place to release my creativity and energy,” she says.
Since opening in 2012, The Coffee Academics has expanded to 16 outlets in the city, with four in Singapore, and one each in Thailand and Beijing. More are set to open in Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Liu says her success in a market dominated by the likes of Starbucks lies in using distinctive speciality coffee sourced from the top five per cent of the best Arabica beans.
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In 2017, The Coffee Academics ranked first in speciality coffee in Hong Kong, according to business consulting firm Frost and Sullivan.
Liu has integrated charity into her business, making social contributions at home and abroad through TCA Connect, an NGO she set up.
Since 2013, she has traded directly with small plantation farmers to let them earn more, bypassing middlemen, while also encouraging causes related to women, education, children, clean water and minorities.
“The one thing that has never changed, from my grandfather to my parents and to me, is the concept of charity – giving back to communities,” she says.
