Li Ka-shing

Current Company

CK Hutchison Holdings — Founder & Senior Advisor

From Refugee to Superman: The Making of Asia's Greatest Tycoon

Li Ka-shing's life story reads like a parable about the transformative power of commerce and the opportunities that emerge from displacement and upheaval. Born in Chaozhou, Guangdong Province, in 1928, Li fled to Hong Kong with his family during the Japanese occupation of China. His father died of tuberculosis when Li was 15, forcing him to leave school and work in a plastics factory to support his family. By 22, he had saved enough to start his own plastics company, Cheung Kong Industries, which initially produced plastic flowers — a product that was surging in demand as European and American consumers sought affordable decorative goods. The plastic flowers business generated the capital that Li reinvested into Hong Kong real estate during the 1967 riots, when property prices collapsed and most investors fled — a contrarian bet that laid the foundation for one of the largest fortunes in the world.

Li's nickname, 'Superman,' was earned through decades of deal-making that seemed to defy the limitations that constrained ordinary business leaders. His conglomerate expanded into telecommunications (building Hutchison Whampoa into a global telecom operator), ports (becoming the world's largest independent port operator), retail (Watsons grew into the world's largest health and beauty retailer with over 16,000 stores), and energy (investing early in Canadian oil sands). Each expansion was characterized by Li's signature approach: buying assets that others undervalued, investing patiently in their development, and selling at the right moment — a discipline that required both analytical rigor and the emotional detachment to ignore market sentiment.

A Legacy Beyond Wealth: Philanthropy and the Hong Kong Story

Li Ka-shing's philanthropic vehicle, the Li Ka Shing Foundation, has donated over $3 billion to education and healthcare initiatives worldwide, with a particular focus on expanding access to higher education in Asia. His single largest philanthropic commitment was the establishment of Shantou University in his ancestral Guangdong Province — a private university that Li has funded with over $1 billion and that has become one of China's most innovative educational institutions. The foundation has also funded medical research programs at universities across North America, Europe, and Asia, reflecting Li's conviction that education and healthcare are the two investments most likely to generate compounding returns for society over the long term.

Li's career is inseparable from the story of Hong Kong itself — the former British colony that transformed from a trading post into one of the world's great financial centers during the same decades that Li was building his empire. His business decisions have often anticipated and reflected the broader geopolitical currents shaping Hong Kong's trajectory, from the 1967 riots to the 1997 handover to China to the more recent political transformations. Now in his nineties, Li has stepped back from day-to-day management of his empire but continues to serve as senior advisor to CK Hutchison Holdings, the successor company to his original conglomerate — a role that reflects both his continued influence and the difficulty of truly retiring from an enterprise that is, in many ways, the work of a lifetime.