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Technology Stocks : PCW - Pacific Century CyberWorks Limited -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (1224)	5/17/2001 10:52:58 PM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2248

Hong Kong's chastened tycoon By Joe Leahy, Ruth Sullivan and Jeff Pruzan Published: May 17 2001 20:50GMT \| Last Updated: May 17 2001 20:59GMT If 2000 marked Richard Li's finest hour of accomplishment, 2001 has thus far proved a year of endless embarrassments. Pacific Century CyberWorks, the internet turned telecoms company that bought Hong Kong Telecom from Cable and Wireless of the UK last year, has begun searching for a replacement for its 34-year-old founder and executive chairman. To be sure, Mr Li acknowledges his board's concerns, but says he will step aside only if PCCW finds a suitable replacement - something he doubts will happen this year. Shareholders may not be quite so patient. Shares in PCCW have lost 90 per cent of their value since February 2000 and have shown only static activity for several months. The son of Li Ka-shing, chairman of Hutchinson Whampoa and the richest man in Hong Kong, has other problems. The word "lawsuit" has begun percolating, with shareholders angry not only at slumping PCCW prices, but at an apparent falsehood concerning Mr Li's education. Mr Li has long contended that he earned a computer science degree from Silicon Valley's prestigious Stanford University in 1987. Last month, in connection with his seat on the board of Rediff, an Indian computer group, he admitted that he never graduated. The revelation cast doubt on Rediff's competence, reverberated at PCCW and humiliated Mr Li. It all marks a dramatic shift in the fortunes of Mr Li, who just 18 months ago basked in the title of Asia's most eligible bachelor, and who lured Whitney Houston, the American pop singer, to provide accompaniment for the popping champagne corks at his millennial New Year's bash. Richard Li is a product of a business from birth. As a little boy he used to sit silently with his older brother Victor at board meetings of the most powerful business family in Hong Kong, chaired by his stern father. At 13 he was bundled off to Menlo Park, an exclusive school in Silicon Valley where he spent some unhappy years. Mr Li remained in the Menlo Park area, briefly studying computer science next door at Stanford University. After leaving Stanford in 1987 - though not graduating - Mr Li worked at Gordon Capital, an aggressive Canadian investment bank. Later he joined the family business for a turbulent period when he clashed with a tough-nosed ex-Foreign Legion executive. Setting up Star TV with family money was the first step into running his own business. In 1993 Mr Li sold Star TV, the Asiawide satellite network which he had launched at age 24, to Rupert Murdoch for an estimated $950m. He would put proceeds from the Star TV sale to good use by forming PCCW. The New Year's party marked a good start to a promising year for PCCW. He would make his mark in August with the closing of its HK$28bn ($3.6bn) purchase of HKT, Asia's largest deal outside Japan to date. The deal with former owner Cable & Wireless also snatched HKT out of the hands his old acquaintance, Mr Murdoch, who had wanted to buy HKT in a joint deal with SingTel and his own News Corporation. The HKT purchase transformed PCCW from an internet company with some property interests to a telecommunications company that includes an old-fashioned fixed line service - a welcome asset as technology stocks continued weakening. Though his timing was impeccable - the deal would probably have been impossible a few months later - it could not have been worse for investors who had bought into his internet dream. It also forced PCCW into discussions about loans - assistance that would have seemed unthinkably unneeded at the time of the deal. But with HKT as its biggest asset, PCCW's commitment both to cyberspace, and to Mr Li himself, seems less clear than it did a year ago. news.ft.com

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (1224)	5/17/2001 11:23:16 PM
From: ms.smartest.person	Respond to of 2248

'Superboy' comes crashing back to Earth Friday, May 18, 2001 VICTORIA BUTTON If the definition of good publicity is making the front cover of Time magazine, then the absolute reverse probably looks something like the one-paragraph mention Richard Li Tzar-kai received recently. Last April he appeared on the cover and was referred to as the "Superboy" with a "spanking new empire" after Asia's biggest takeover outside Japan - Pacific Century CyberWorks' merger with Cable & Wireless HKT. Then, almost exactly a year later, came the paragraph in a column listing "People to Watch in International Business". "Li, 34, had much more to explain recently than his company's US$886 million [HK$6.91 billion] loss during 2000. For instance, why did he claim to be a 1987 Stanford graduate when he had spent only three years there? . . . The Stanford admission may have made credibility as big a problem for Li as profitability." The market analysts who made him their darling had also started muttering about the company's need for reform and a lack of management depth. There was speculation that big-name executives would be hired as line managers - a move the company in effect said was possible yesterday. Mr Li is not having a much easier time of it at the hands of Time's stablemate publication Fortune. To be fair, Mr Li was invited to the Fortune Global Forum last week and cameras relaying proceedings to the media dwelt on his cheerful chats to corporate types before the first session. However, he was notably absent from a later session, called Next Generation Leaders Look Ahead, which included James Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of Star TV, and Jeffrey Koo Jnr, president and chief operating officer of Chinatrust Commercial Bank. Mr Li was also not one of the 25 rising stars profiled in the magazine. Instead, Hanson Cheah, 36, founder of AsiaTech Ventures, was picked to represent Hong Kong. A year ago, Mr Li seemed to have something approaching a perfect life - beautiful women, respect for having emerged from his father's shadow, even a TV in his shower. When he was up, there seemed to be an unusually large number of people in the dotcom world who suddenly decided they too should buzz-cut their hair, wear chinos and abandon their ties. The media made much of the mansion he was building at Shek O, his luxury apartment, his work ethic, his nickname in the Chinese press of "Golden Bachelor" and his flash lifestyle. Roll the tape forward and you can see the crowd at the Rugby Sevens backing the call when, on the big screen, a message along these lines appears amid the birthday greetings: "Richard Li, where's my money?" Pacific Century CyberWorks' share price has tumbled to a fraction of its former glory - and you could almost hear the knives being sharpened as it fell. If you invested your fortune in the company at its peak of $28.50 a share early last year, you would now be sitting on a pile less than one-tenth the size. When the Stanford scandal broke, the world's media jumped all over the story. Pacific Century CyberWorks' history of fastidiousness at detecting errors - perceived and real - in coverage did not help, as the media pointed out with delight that Mr Li had never bothered to correct the claim he had graduated from Stanford. The resonance of the story was based on more than the age-old delight in seeing the mighty fall - or at least stumble. It came to symbolise the bursting of the Internet bubble itself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SCMP.com is the premier information resource on Greater China. With a click, you will be able to access information on Business, Markets, Technology and Property in the territory. Bookmark SCMP.com for more insightful and timely updates on Hong Kong, China, Asia and the World. Voted the Best Online newspaper outside the US and brought to you by the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's premier English launguage news source. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published in the South China Morning Post. Copyright © 2001. All rights reserved. hongkong.scmp.com