13-03-2025
How to Spend $19 Billion With Blood on the Streets
Great investors rarely fear tumultuous times. 'Buy when there is blood on the streets,' in the words of a quote usually attributed to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the British-German banker who made a fortune from the Napoleonic wars.
Hong Kong's greatest investor learned that lesson well. Li Ka-shing, the 96-year-old founder of CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd., turned himself from a plastic flower manufacturer into a property tycoon by purchasing real estate at fire-sale prices after the city's 1967 riots. He pounced on utility HK Electric in the midst of a crisis in Sino-British relations in 1985, and made it the seed of one of the world's biggest infrastructure businesses. He started building up a ports conglomerate in the Chinese mainland eight years later, when it was still largely closed off from the world in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
