The Gambling King

Note: This is Part 1 in a series of articles and cases on Asian Conglomerates. You may read more about the Asian Conglomerate Series here, or view all the published cases here.

This marks the start of the Asian Conglomerate Series. Over the next few months, we’re going to look at a number of Asian tycoons and their business empires. If you’re following along, you should begin to pick out certain patterns across all the businesses.

I’ll talk more about the themes in the next instalment. It’s probably important to set context, explain the goals for this series, and talk about what is generalisable. But all of that will happen in the next part. For now, I want to open with two cases, the first of which is something we’ve published a month ago.

The precursor series to our exploration of Asian conglomerates is a mini-series on power in business. It is recommended that readers finish that series before starting on this one. If you grew up in a developed country (loosely: ‘the West’), there is at least one major concept in there that you’ll want to internalise before you start on this one. And if you grew up in the East (or in any country where rule-of-law is less settled — like, say, Russia) you should find that the series will give you language for concepts you already know in your bones.

In the final instalment of the power series we looked at the early career of Stanley Ho, the erstwhile gambling king of Macau. Ho cut his teeth as a 20 year old trader, playing counter-parties against each other to survive in World War II. We used that case to demonstrate what it’s like to do business under ambiguous, maybe even non-existent rule of law. The main point we wanted to make is that you don’t need trust if you have leverage — and the more leverage you have, the less trust you need. This is something that you should see repeatedly in the stories of the Asian businesses we’re about to examine together.

The first case of the Asian Conglomerate series is about the rest of Stanley Ho’s career. Present in this second case are all the concepts that we want to discuss about Asian tycoons. For now, read the case below, and think about what concepts or themes are present. What leaps out at you? What do you think might apply in your own operating contexts?

We’ll talk about what is interesting in these two cases in the next part of this series, where we’ll also do the setup for the entire series. See you on the other side.