Ordinary Gweilo

The Guardian has a story about Jimmy Lai (The voice of Hong Kong – free registration required):

His business products are easy to find on the streets – the Chinese-language Apple Daily newspaper, the weekly Next Magazine, and stablemates Easy Finder and Sudden Weekly.

Jimmy Lai is that rare character in the wealthy Asian business elite – a successful media tycoon with a passion for talking about democracy as "a moral imperative".

His publications are famous for bringing a new low to local reporting style, splashing blood and sex across their pages; his editorials are consistently in favour of universal suffrage for Hong Kong people.

[..]

Born in 1948, in southern China, Lai arrived in Hong Kong aged 12 by the then classic route of a fishing boat. He taught himself English, started doing odd jobs in a glove factory and gradually built up capital to invest.

When Lai launched Apple Daily in 1995, the fervour he generated was immense. He injected frantic competition into an already crowded market of more than 30 daily Chinese-language newspapers. "The newspapers are driven by Jimmy. We’re a company that’s driven by Jimmy. Jimmy Lai is Next Media. Jimmy is our Richard Branson," says Simon.

He once owned the Giordano clothing chain, a rare example of a home-grown fashion brand, but resigned so as not to impede the company’s progress on the mainland. However, when he ventured into an effort to break the stranglehold of two major business groups in Hong Kong, he came a cropper.

That venture, called adMart, aimed to offer an alternative to Hong Kong’s Park’n’Shop and Wellcome supermarkets, owned by two of the largest conglomerates: the Hutchison Whampoa group of Asia’s richest man Li Ka-shing, and Jardine Matheson respectively. Lai claims the feud between him and Li is all one-way, from Li’s side. His papers, meanwhile, gobble up scandal involving the tycoons, and have run investigative pieces that directly hit the interests of Matheson and Li.

"We are very bitter enemies because if you have an independent media, you tend to offend those tycoons and all the tycoons think they can dictate a lot of things because they’re so powerful, and sometimes they find they cannot do that and they get really mad," says Lai.

With adMart, vengeance was swift. Suppliers were threatened with loss of business if they supplied Lai’s internet delivery scheme, and adMart died. "AdMart was a failure, it was a stupid idea, a failure," admits Lai.

It’s misleading to imply that they were out to clobber Jimmy Lai because of his politics – the two main supermarket chains managed to drive Carrefour out of Hong Kong with similar tactics.  Anyway, he was probably doomed to failure regardless – the reality was that it simply wasn’t possible to make make money delivering cut-price cases of Coca-Cola to homes and offices around Hong Kong.  Countless other similar schemes around the world (e.g. Webvan) also failed for similar reasons, and these days (in Hong Kong as in the rest of the world), it is the established retailers who offer online ordering and home delivery.

Independent pro-democracy lawmaker Emily Lau, who is a former journalist, has described Apple Daily as independent but shallow. One media analyst, asking not to be named, said that Lai’s firm stand for democracy in past years was of course to be admired, but that he was a "slippery fish", his publishing empire was going nowhere, and Lai was wasting his energies without a clear vision for tackling future challenges.

"Oh yeah, and that’s why he’s taken over Taiwan media? He’s taken Taiwan by storm. This is not someone at a dead end," counters Jake van der Kamp, the most widely read business analyst in Hong Kong.

I suppose the question is where he can go after Taiwan, assuming he wants to expand internationally.  But maybe he doesn’t.