The man who made Hong Kong a force in the global shipping industry
Shipping magnate Pao Yue-kong charted a course that made HK a global force in cargo as he mingled with world leaders
Vision, pragmatism and hard work were behind the phenomenal success of the late Pao Yue-kong (1918-1991), who put Hong Kong on the map in the international shipping industry.
But to go beyond simply becoming wealthy to hobnobbing with world leaders required considerable charisma and, in Pao's daughter's words, "a great sense of humour".
Nicknamed "King of the Sea" by Newsweek magazine on its front cover in 1976, Pao and his flagship World-Wide Shipping Company owned the world's biggest fleet, with a total tonnage of 13 million deadweight tonnes - more than that of Japanese shipper Sanko Kisen and Denmark's A.P. Moller - the second and third biggest - combined.
Pao started his shipping empire with the HK$20,000 he and his family took from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1949, said his eldest daughter, Anna Pao Sohmen in her new book, Y.K. Pao: My Father, to be published next week.
When Pao purchased his first ship, an 8,200-tonne coal carrier, in 1955, he was a novice "banker-turned-shipper". That modest start would evolve into one of the world's most formidable fleets in just 15 years.
"Father was a visionary," Pao Sohmen said. "He talked about globalisation way before other people were thinking about it. So he was definitely ahead of a lot of people."