Lee Shau-kee, a Hong Kong real estate tycoon who made his immense fortune building tens of thousands of apartments for middle-class descendants of refugees who had fled Communist mainland China, died on Monday. He was 97.
His death was announced by the company he founded, Henderson Land Development. It did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Well into his 70s, Mr. Lee became even wealthier through shrewd financial investments that prompted some to call him Hong Kong’s Warren Buffett. At his death, Forbes magazine estimated his worth at $29.2 billion, making him the 63rd wealthiest person in the world.
Mr. Lee founded Henderson Land Development in 1976. By the time he stepped down as its chairman and managing director in 2019 at age 91, the company had grown to 10,000 employees and spread beyond real estate development into hotels, department stores and natural gas distribution.
He started his career as a gold and currency dealer, reinvesting his profits in real estate. Most speculators and developers preferred higher-priced plots on the island of Hong Kong. But Mr. Lee was certain that the rising tide of hardworking, upwardly mobile refugees from the mainland and their descendants would send property prices soaring. He took a chance, buying up large chunks of cheap agricultural land in the New Territories bordering the mainland.
His business strategy, he said, was based on trends indicating that wages were rising far faster than property prices, putting apartments within reach of hundreds of thousands of buyers and renters. In the 1970s and ’80s, Henderson Land Development erected the new town of Sha Tin, which became home to more than a half-million people.
“Young couples were choosing to live in their own homes instead of with their parents as they had done traditionally,” Mr. Lee told his official biographer, Leung Fung-yee.
Mr. Lee himself lived in one of the nondescript residential towers that his company built throughout Hong Kong and liked to spend his leisure time golfing with fellow magnates.
As his real estate business grew, Mr. Lee staffed his management with relatives, including his children and nieces and nephews. At least 10 of them held senior positions; two sons, Peter and Martin, became joint chairmen in 2019.
Mr. Lee channeled most of his philanthropy through the Lee Shau-Kee Foundation, funding buildings and scholarships at universities in Hong Kong, China and other countries. The foundation also financed vocational training for farmers and rural doctors in mainland China.
Mr. Lee once considered making major investments abroad, he said, but decided in the end to stay on the island. “Elsewhere the taxes are too high,” he told Forbes in 1997, noting that in 1996, he collected $340 million in tax-free dividends, plowing most of this windfall back into his real estate ventures. “You couldn’t snowball your profits.”
Lee Shau-kee was born on Jan. 29, 1928, in Shunde, on the outskirts of Guangzhou, then known as Canton, in southern China, to Lee Gai-fu and Chan Luan-fung. His father, a well-to-do currency trader, sent him to Hong Kong in 1948 when Mao Zedong’s Communists were about to triumph over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in China’s civil war.
As a teenager, Mr. Lee became a gold trader, first with his father and then on his own. As an adult, he decided to move to Hong Kong and embark on real estate development. He co-founded Sun Hung Kai Properties with two other partners in 1963 and started Henderson Land Development on his own 13 years later.
Henderson became a publicly traded company in 1981, though a majority of its shares were owned by Lee family members.
Mr. Lee had occasional business fallouts with his relatives, most notably with his wife of 15 years, Lau Wai-kuen, whom he divorced in 1981. “I will not marry again because I’m afraid any woman would only see my money,” he told his biographer.
His survivors include his two sons, three daughters and his sister, Fung Lee Woon King, an executive director at Henderson Land Development.
Toward the end of the 20th century, economic and political trends undermined the Hong Kong real estate market that had propelled Mr. Lee into the ranks of the world’s richest people. With China embracing capitalist reforms, foreign investors rushed to set up factories and offices on the mainland, and Shanghai challenged Hong Kong as Asia’s pre-eminent financial capital. And with the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong and its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the island-city lost some of its aura of a freewheeling business center. With fewer corporations setting up offices in Hong Kong, the local property market stagnated.
Mr. Lee’s critics predicted his empire’s decline, citing it as a cautionary tale about the perils facing a business that had outgrown its traditional, family-run organization.
“Lee Shau-kee is typical of the post-World War II generation of Chinese entrepreneurs in Asia,” the Far Eastern Economic Review said in a long profile of him in 2001. Despite building a profitable empire in the midst of turmoil, the magazine wrote, Mr. Lee “has had difficulties preparing it for a new generation and a new business environment.”
He proved such doomsayers wrong with profitable investments in financial stocks, derivatives and new ventures such as paper manufacturing. His touch was so sure that he tried to hide his investment plans from speculators trying to follow his every move.
At the same time, Mr. Lee was growing increasingly impatient with his heirs. In 1998, he told Hong Kong journalists that after a decade of tutelage in the family business, his oldest son, Peter, was not ready to succeed him. “He gets only a passing grade now,” Mr. Lee said.
At the time, investors and financial analysts were even less impressed by another son, Martin, who had to overcome a youthful passion for sports cars and nightlife.
But they regained his confidence over the years, and took control of the company after Mr. Lee stepped down.
For their part, Mr. Lee’s sons professed loyalty to their father and urged him to retain leadership of the family business as long as possible. “I will be the first one to ask him not to retire,” Peter Lee told The South China Morning Post in 2001.
The sentiment was in keeping with Mr. Lee’s own strong sense of filial piety. In 1996, he built a four-story mausoleum, topped with a tower embedded with semiprecious stones, on an acre in his family’s ancestral village of Daliang, in the southern Pearl River Delta. He buried his parents there.
