Adrian Cheng, heir to a $17.2bn family fortune and general manager of New World Development, sidles into a banquette at the Murray Hotel, the former government office of colonial-era Hong Kong. He clutches a takeaway coffee, spurning the sumptuous buffet on offer, and is unaccompanied by his usual retinue of bodyguards and advisers. “I always bring my own coffee,” he laughs.
It is an odd choice for a man whose wealth comes from an empire spanning property, hotels and retail. Along with his father, Henry Cheng, he runs Hong-Kong based New World Development, a HK$130bn conglomerate founded in 1970 by his grandfather, the late Cheng Yu-tung, and Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group.
That takeaway coffee illustrates one of the 39-year-old’s cardinal rules, born of a misreading of China’s retail market in 2008: look at what your customers are doing in real life, not what focus groups and trendy buzzwords tell you. Or, as he describes it, “feel the pulse of the customer”.