In September 2015, the "Lookout Think Tank", a think tank affiliated with Xinhua News Agency, published an article entitled "Don't Let Li Ka-shing Run", denouncing Li Ka-shing's frenzied cash-out from China and running to Europe to buy and buy.
In the article, the author believes that although it is inevitable to buy low and sell high, the huge wealth that Li Ka-shing has taken away from China basically comes from infrastructure, ports and real estate, and none of these areas can leave the official strong support for him:
"At the sensitive moment when China's economy is experiencing a crisis, the continuous selling has caused pessimism to spread among some groups, and its moral high point has been lost."
It has been 6 years since the Observatory Think Tank published this article, and Li Ka-shing has cashed out more than 370 billion yuan from Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, "singing short" China's economy all the way.
Li Ka-shing is a businessman who began to practice first getting rich and running away before Pan Shiyi. He took the money to Europe and became the old man in the Western media who "almost bought Britain" and was personally knighted by the Queen.
Recently, this old man who "picked melons" seems to have returned.
On October 5, WM Motor announced that it expects to receive a new round of financing of about $500 million. More than $300 million of the D1 round was led by PCCW and Shun Tak.
Among them, PCCW is the family business that Li Ka-shing's son "Little Superman" Li Zekai is managing.
WM Motors is the leader of China's new car-making forces closely following "Wei Xiaoli". Digging deeper, you will find that this is not The first time that Li Ka-shing has sold the new energy industry on the mainland.
In 2021, Li Ka-shing's Yangtze River Infrastructure and State Grid Power reached a cooperation intention to invest 2.5 billion yuan to participate in new energy projects.
In addition, this year, he won two pieces of land in Chengdu and Shanghai, and quietly increased his own stock. Yes, Li Ka-shing is indeed coming back again.
So the question is, why did Li Ka-shing leave in the first place? Why are you coming back now?
And, how to evaluate his wave of operations?
01
As a representative of a generation of "Hong Kong Dreams", Li Ka-shing was once an idol admired by thousands of people.
He came to Hong Kong at the age of 12 after escaping war with his father. Since then, he has worked, traveled to churches, and made a fortune in the plastic flower business, creating a huge business empire with a market value of about HK$1 trillion, branches in 53 countries, and more than 230,000 employees.
Once upon a time, when I went to Hong Kong to take a taxi and talked about Li Ka-shing with a driver, nine out of ten would give him a thumbs up and call him "Li Chaoren".
It wasn't until 2010, when a book was published, that Li Ka-shing and several Hong Kong billionaires were suddenly thrown into the storm of public opinion.
The name of the book is "Real Estate Hegemony." The author, Pan Wai-hsien, was the personal assistant of Sun Hung Kai Properties Group founder Kwok Tak-shing for eight years.
According to the book, Hong Kong society at that time was largely controlled by six major families – the Li Ka-shing family of the Cheung Wo family, the Kwok family of Sun Hung Kai, the Lee Shau Kee family of Henderson Land, the Cheng Yu Tong family of New World, the Bao and Ng families of Wharf in Wharf and the Kadoorie family of CLP Group.
Based on public economic data and her own personal experience, Poon has strung together the large and small events familiar to Hong Kong people for more than a decade, depicting a shocking picture of the lifeblood of the super oligopoly Hong Kong economy.
The people at the bottom of Hong Kong seem to have found the crux of the problem overnight, and the words "real estate hegemony" have become high-frequency words and have been repeatedly quoted by the public.
As the head of the six major families, the Li family has become the target of public criticism. Many Hong Kong people firmly believe that li ka-shing shoulders an unshirkable responsibility as a vested interest in the "fall" of Hong Kong society.
The loss of the mass base was only the beginning of Li Ka-shing's loss of power in Hong Kong.
In 2012, Hong Kong was re-elected and Leung Chun-ying was elected.
For a long time, Li Ka-shing supported Liang's opponent, tang Yingnian, who was also a pro-establishment faction. During the chief executive election, Li Ka-shing publicly stated that he was not familiar with Leung Chun-ying, "just like doing business, he would not support unfamiliar people."
On the day of the election, knowing that Leung Chun-ying had a chance of winning, Li Ka-shing stubbornly voted for Tang Yingnian.
A scholar familiar with local politics told mainland reporters that Tang Yingnian was a standard descendant of a family, while Leung Chun-ying was a civilian and his father was a police officer. The two have very different backgrounds, making the supporters behind them completely different.
After Leung's election, in a meeting with the media after the General Meeting of Shareholders of the Cheung Wo Department in May 2012, Li Ka-shing said that if [Leung Chun-ying] pushed down property prices, it would not be in the interests of Hong Kong people, and that land policies should be decent, attentive and take into account the wishes of the entire Hong Kong people.
However, as soon as the voice dropped, in February 2013, Leung Chun-ying introduced the toughest property market regulation policy in Hong Kong's history: non-Hong Kong people are required to pay 15% additional stamp duty and double stamp duty when buying industrial and commercial and residential properties.
Hong Kong media call this a "double spicy move".
As a vested interest in Hong Kong's real estate industry, Li Ka-shing has unconsciously stood against the interests of the people.
He will certainly be greeted by the opposition of the people of Hong Kong.
On March 28, 2013, a group of workers at the Kwai Chung Container Terminal in Hong Kong, dissatisfied with the fact that their wages had not increased for 15 years, launched a strike that lasted 40 days, making it the longest workers' movement in Hong Kong after World War II.
The world's largest private container terminal, part of the Hutchison Whampoa Port Group, employs most of its dockers by outsourcers – in a way, Li Ka-shing is not a direct employer of the workers, nor is he a negotiator.
The workers, however, pointed the finger directly at him. Workers pull up banners in front of Cheung Sil Headquarters in Central:
"The richest Chinese in the world, exploiting workers to get rich"; "Raising Li, can't afford to raise a family".
He also painted Li Ka-shing's large head as a "vampire" with green faces and fangs, and even held a ceremony to "summon the soul" of Li Ka-shing in front of the door on May Day.
Not only that, but the striking workers also went to Li Ka-shing's private residence in Deep Water Bay to demonstrate. When a mainland journalist who went to Hong Kong to cover an interview took a taxi and mentioned Li Ka-shing again:
"Ten out of ten people, when they heard his name, immediately scolded him for 'collusion between officials and businessmen,' and even called him a 'traitorous businessman.'"
The strike by workers at Kwai Chung Wharf is believed to be the trigger for Li Ka-shing to start selling hong Kong assets.
In the next seven or eight years, Li Ka-shing sold 200 billion hong Kong assets in one go.
02
If it is said that the sale of Hong Kong assets was due to public resistance, but Li Ka-shing, who has been cared for by the mainland government, why should even mainland assets be sold?
This has to say that Li Ka-shing's "pure" business model. As we all know, 2014 and 2015 are the shift period of China's economic growth.
The data shows that GDP growth was 7.3% year-on-year in 2014 and fell to 6.9% in 2015.
With china's rapid economic development for more than 30 years, Li Ka-shing has hitched a ride on the express train of reform and opening up and made away the fast money and easy money of real estate.
But when China's economy enters a transformation, to carry out industrial upgrading and gnaw the hard bones of high-end manufacturing, Li Ka-shing, who is accustomed to making quick money on the mainland, does not want to continue to invest.
Even if you don't invest, watching China's GDP growth slow down, Li Ka-shing is also looking down on the mainland economy.
Most of his initial sales in the mainland were office buildings and properties, not residential.
Because property rents are very sensitive to the impact of the economic boom, Li Ka-shing's selling of office buildings is almost telling everyone that there will be a large number of enterprises to close.
In particular, the sale of the Oriental Plaza on Beijing's Chang'an Avenue and the Oriental Huijing in Lujiazui, Shanghai, which is china's political center and economic powerhouse, are marked by Li Ka-shing.
His sell-off, in any case, is seen as a "landmark" event that has had some negative effects on The transition period in China's economy.
At the same time, Li Ka-shing began to "bottom out" Europe.
As we all know, Li Ka-shing's several great leaps in wealth in his life are related to the bottom.
At that time, the European debt crisis had far-reaching effects, the entire economy had not yet shaken off the shadow, the euro was weakening, coupled with the background of Brexit, Li Ka-shing felt that it was a good opportunity to bottom out the United Kingdom.
The Li family father and son spent 400 billion yuan to "buy Britain", look at his achievements in those years.
In 2010, Li Ka-shing bought a monopoly-level power company in the UK and controlled 30% of the UK's electricity supply.
In 2011, Li Ka-shing bought britain's largest water company for HK$30 billion, providing drinking water to more than 7% of the UK's population.
In 2011, Li Ka-shing bought a British gas and utility company for HK$8 billion in the UK to provide gas distribution services to a quarter of the UK's population.
In 2015, Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa spent nearly HK$100 billion to buy Britain's largest telecommunications operator.
In 2016, Li Ka-shing bought Greene King, a bar with more than 1,700 stores in the UK, for HK$43 billion.
With a total investment of more than £30 billion, Li Ka-shing has become the UK's largest single overseas investor.
In those years of frenzied selling of Chinese assets to Europe, Li Ka-shing's favorite thing to say was that this was a normal business practice of "buying low and selling high". But the article "Don't Let Li Ka-shing Run" directly points out his hypocrisy:
Borrowing power when cooperating, and talking about the market when selling, double standards make it difficult to calm down.
03
After Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the entire Hong Kong elite has received good care from the mainland, official projects such as ports and infrastructure have been soft, and it is also a good policy to invest in the mainland.
Li Ka-shing, as a figure like a Leader in the Chinese business community at that time, took the lead in particular. In September 1978, Li Ka-shing came to Beijing wearing a zhongshan suit. He told the media for the first time to climb the Great Wall:
It's nice to feel like back to your homeland.
The feeling of returning to the motherland is indeed good. Because in the next thirty years, he will make a lot of money by covering the land with one hand.
According to public information, in the past 30 years, Li Ka-shing has developed nearly 30 real estate projects in the mainland, but only 1/3 of them have been completed.
The secret of Li Ka-shing's real estate money is not to develop, but to cover the land.
For example, the Chengdu Nancheng Duhui commercial and residential project sold by Changshi Group was not developed for 16 years from land auction to sale, but in the end it made a net profit of 3.451 billion yuan.
The process of "making money on the ground" is roughly like this:
At the beginning, Li Ka-shing first promised a beautiful vision to the local governments, saying some false words such as building this place into a "small Hong Kong", and after successfully obtaining the land, he began to delay the construction for various reasons, waiting for the surrounding schools, hospitals, businesses, etc. to develop, and then sell the land at a high price.
That is to say, Li Ka-shing is authentically treating land as a financial product, as an investment and financial management.
His practice is typical of self-interest, lying down to earn money, undermining local development.
There is a regional distribution of Li Ka-shing suspected of hoarding and covering the land on the Internet, and you can see how outrageous it is.
Li Ka-shing's approach eventually angered some of our local governments.
In September 2020, the Chengdu High-tech Zone issued a document saying that financial institutions in the high-tech zone were prohibited from providing new financing and loans to Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa (Chengdu) Co., Ltd.
The reason is that Hutchison Whampoa has bad behavior such as covering the land and holding the plate.
So why did Li Ka-shing return from Britain to China to buy and buy?
The reason is actually the interest.
The UK economy shrank by 9.8% in 2020, the biggest GDP decline experienced in 300 years. Many of Li Ka-shing's investments not only did not return, but also suffered huge losses.
According to Cheung Kong Industrial Group Co., Ltd. (01113. HK) released data for the first half of 2020.
According to the financial report as of June 30, 2020, the real estate income of Changshi Group is mainly supported by the performance of the mainland, and it has lost 1.9 billion yuan in the BRITISH bar business, which it has high hopes for.
Changshi Group's profit was nearly 60% less than in 2019, at HK$6.36 billion (about 5.705 billion yuan), a year-on-year decrease of 57.96%.
For the first time in 21 years, Li Ka-shing lost the title of Asia's richest man.
In the face of the harsh reality, "Superman" Li Ka-shing also had to bow his head and publicly expressed his intention to sell the London headquarters building of UBS Group, which he purchased in 2018.
In contrast, China's economy has thrived in the post-pandemic era.
For Li Ka-shing, business is business, and since it is still a good business in China, then come back, no matter how big the face is, it is not big enough.
End
Seeing that Li Ka-shing is back, many netizens commented on the news below:
This vampire, don't come back.
It can be seen that for this businessman who has made 30 years of quick money on the mainland and left, ordinary people have complaints in their hearts.
But whether Li Ka-shing leaves or returns, China's official attitude has always been calm. When Li Ka-shing withdrew his investment, Lian Weiliang, then deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, made it clear:
Some people go, some people come, some people are bearish, some people are bullish. As long as China deepens reform, firmly completes the transformation, and maintains market vitality, there is no need to worry about Li Ka-shing not having capital to come in.
It turns out that this is indeed the case. More and more capital is returning to China, recognizing and joining investments in new energy, high-end manufacturing and the real economy.
Of course, Li Ka-shing can also come back, but he can no longer just think of just making a quick buck from China, and we will not give him such an opportunity again.
Although capital has no borders, businessmen should have a motherland.