The View | Hong Kong firms must break their family ties
People with new ideas, not risk-averse family companies, will be driving future wealth creation
The strange demise of the importance of Hong Kong Chinese family companies comes at a time when the city desperately needs to reinvigorate its business and innovation culture and redirect its investment priorities.
How a new generation creates new wealth for the city will be crucial to determining Hong Kong's role in China and the rest of the world.
Pre-1997, patriarch-run Hong Kong Chinese family businesses were lauded by management schools for building business models with distinct advantages over their Western counterparts. All of these Hong Kong families exerted influence, formed social cliques and married among each other. Coming from "a good family" was actually a hiring criteria.
Today, Hong Kong's family-dominated, corporate landscape is an ossified museum of narrow-minded, risk-averse people who are ill suited for innovating disintermediating technologies.
During the first phase of the internet in the 1990s, some cynically distorted its purpose. They weren't alone in simply adding dotcom suffixes to business names, or slipping "i" or "e" prefixes to them either.
PCCW loudly proclaimed itself the century's new technology leader. One day it might be, but at the moment it is best known for its excitingly named, but rather more mundane controversial Cyberport property development, and for owning one of the licences in Hong Kong's tight-knit telecommunications business.
Even world-beating companies seem reluctant to embrace and adapt new technology.
