Lee Comes Looking For `critical Mass'
Tony Walker
03/30/2001
Australian Financial Review
Page 10 Copyright of John Fairfax Group Pty Ltd
Brigadier General Lee Hsien Yang is far from a household name in Australia, but he is about to become much better known here as chief executive of a combined Singapore Telecommunications and Cable and Wireless Optus.
So, why would the younger son of the man who warned that Australians risked ending up as the ``white trash'' of Asia want to a own a piece of corporate Australia whose customers are the same ``white trash''?
The answer to this lies in two words: ``critical mass'', a concept the 43-year-old engineering graduate-cum-soldier BG Lee would understand very well.
Unless SingTel grows substantially out of its city-State chrysalis and fast it runs the risk of wilting in the face of a tsunami of telco competition across Asia involving Japanese, US, UK and Australian carriers, notably Telstra.
Following a deregulation of Singapore's telecommunications market from April 1 last year, SingTel faces increased competition in its previously inviolable home territory.
This is why the company under Lee has been striving for the past 18 months at least to break the shackles of its island home, with an unsuccessful bid for Cable&Wireless Hong Kong Telecom, followed by an ill-fated attempt to buy into Malaysia's TimedotCom telecom company.
In the event, and despite a partnership with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, BG was gazumped by Richard Li of Pacific Century CyberWorks in Hong Kong, and in Malaysia innate Malay suspicions of Singaporean interests getting their hands on local business jewels scuppered the TimedotCom deal.
Outflanked to the north, and outmanoeuvred across the causeway, SingTel looked west to London and Cable & Wireless, and south-east to Optus headquarters in Sydney, where chief executive Chris Anderson was seeking to generate a bidding war.
In the end, partly for regulatory reasons and also because of a flat telco market internationally, Anderson didn't manage to breathe as much life into the Optus sale as he might have wished and his own options package dictated. But he did get a sale.
So SingTel got its hands on Australia's second telco network, and Optus and Australia got the son of the father, or as more irreverent Singaporeans would have it in their depiction of Lee Family Inc God the Father (Lee Kuan Yew), God the Sons (Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Lee Hsien Yang himself) and Goh the Holy Ghost (Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong).
This might be a facetious depiction of Singapore's ruling oligarchs, but it also underscores the intensely personal nature of the city-State's elite, where decision making is often conducted in-house and ``in-club''.
In Australia, SingTel will face a very different environment, especially as its aim presumably will be to continue to challenge the dominant Telstra on virtually all fronts.
Inevitably, this will embroil the combined company in political and regulatory cut and thrust, something BG Lee and his senior executives will have to get used to.
So, what do we know about the head of SingTel and about his ability to convert the combined company into a pan-Asian telecommunications powerhouse?
The elder Lee's memoir, The Singapore Story, makes relatively scant mention of his younger son (he also has a daughter, Wei Ling). He mentions that Hsien Yang was educated at the Catholic High School in Singapore where he was ``completely Chinese-educated'', which means that the SingTel boss is fluent in Mandarin. His English is flawless and his Malay serviceable, reflecting the island-State's ethnic mix.
Singapore's Who's Who records that Lee Hsien Yang was born in 1957 and educated at Cambridge, where he secured double first-class honours in engineering. He later went to Stanford in the US where he was awarded a master of management degree.
Then followed 19 years in the Singapore military, destination for a number of the city-State's best and brightest, where among other tasks he commanded an artillery battalion and rose to the rank of brigadier-general, departing the military for SingTel where he has been chief executive since 1995.
But all this is pretty dry stuff and does not tell us a great deal about the man, beyond the fact that he has led a pretty exemplary and one assumes as far his relationship with his father is concerned respectful life. He is married with three children to a successful corporate lawyer. His main hobby is gardening, and he has a holiday retreat near Perth in Western Australia.
James Minchin in his book on the Lee family, No Man is an Island, notes that Lee Kuan Yew's children have ``weathered the effects of modern urban education, so often conductive to privatism, prolonged immaturity and self-indulgence. There is no doubt they have put back into society some of what they have received.''
According to a portrait in an army publication some years ago, he is ``more at home with numbers than with words''.
Suffering SingTel and Optus shareholders hope this proves to be the case.
Personal observation of Hsien Yang suggest a fairly down-to-earth customer. Optus's Anderson, for example, says of him that he is ``direct, forceful and very considered''.
The latter squares with the younger Lee's methodical approach since he assumed control of SingTel, which recorded an impressive net profit growth last year of 27.3 per cent.
He'd ``rather win as a loser than lose as a winner'', he has said in an echo of the Chinese board game of Go, which embodies some of this subtlety.
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