One of the
things that I often joked about when I started my parental journey was the fact
that I would probably have to build an arsenal of guns to keep boys away from
my little girl. I was once a horny little boy and becoming a father made me
realise that the last thing, I’d want was for my daughter to deal with boys
like me.
However, my
assumption of basic parenting was from the pre-smartphone age. The Evil Teen
who is now the Evil Young Lady lived her entire social life in cyberspace and instead
of waiting up nights worrying that she was up to no good, I ended up praying
for her to get out and meet people.
I wasn’t alone
in this experience. My friends had the same battle with the kid and the smartphone.
Whenever I got together with one of my best friends, the conversation would
always centre around how our kids were glued to their phones and how they didn’t
quite understand the costs of paying data.
Well, it seems
that my friends and I can relax a little. On 31 August 2021, Singapore had a
new richest man, which is Mr. Forrest Li, the Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited.
The full report on Mr. Li’s accension to become Singapore’s richest can be
found at:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/singapore-got-richest-person-19-160000548.html
Sea Limited is
Southeast Asia’s most valuable company and it is described as a “consumer
internet company,” with businesses ranging from game development, publishing,
ecommerce and fintech. For Singapore’s readers, the most visible part of Sea’s
business is probably Shopee.
Mr. Li, unlike most
of our local tycoons actually has a pretty compelling story. He was born in
China, educated in the USA. Worked as an HR consultant and found that he loved
playing games on the internet and so built his business around it.
As a parent
with a kid tied to the phone, Mr. Li’s story gives me some hope. In my
generation (Gen x), video games were what you did for fun and then grew out of.
Mr. Li’s story gives Asia’s “career obsessed” parents some hope. Mr. Li has shown
that the kid’s hobby might actually be a viable career path and God forbid, the
foundation of a fortune.
However, the
story of Mr. Li’s rise to the top is not just a story of giving parents hope
that the kid locked up in the room playing games all day might actually have a
career path. His story is precisely the success story that Singapore needs. He was
a kid with a passion, who somehow found a way of making this passion pay. He’s
created a business that is part of the “future” and capitalizing on changing trends
(think of how ordering online and paying for things online is becoming a “normal”
part of life.)
If you look at
the list of richest Singaporeans, you’ll notice that Singapore approaches
wealth creation or entrepreneurship creation in the same way that it approaches
attempts to create sporting success. There will be a load of schemes throwing
money at all sorts of programs to develop a grass roots movement for sporting
success or entrepreneurship. Then someone who was parachuted into a prominent
position will lose patience with the slow pace of things (people who are parachuted
into cushy jobs are usually blind to the reality that the reality of sporting success
or entrepreneurial success is usually dim and involves a long hard slog) and
will go for the easy solution – buying people from elsewhere or in the case of
billionaires, giving tax breaks. Just take a look at the latest Forbes List of
Billionaires:
https://www.forbes.com/singapore-billionaires/#44830146757d
Of the top ten,
Mr. Li stands out for one very obvious reason. He is the only one who built a
game changing business in Singapore. Li Xiting of Mindray, Zhang Yong of
Haidilao and most famously Eduardo Severin of Facebook, built their businesses
elsewhere and then settled in Singapore thanks for generous conditions offered
by the government. The only other person in the top five you can be described
as “self-made” is Goh Cheng Liang of Nippon Paint, who built business years
ago. If you look at the top ten richest in Singapore, you’ll find that if they’re
not imported from elsewhere, inherited their wealth. Of the native-born fortunes,
only Goh Cheng Liang and Wee Cho Yaw of UOB belong to the generation that
actually built the wealth.
The nature of
the top ten fortunes would suggests that although Singapore is a wealthy
nation, there’s actually very little genuine wealth creation. In simple terms,
if you didn’t make elsewhere or didn’t get lucky in the genetic lottery, you’re
not going to make it and the best you’ll ever be is a servant to those who already
have it.
Mr. Li, and his
gang of Ge Yang and David Chen at Sea, Dr Shi Xu of Nanofilm Technologies International
(Dr. Shi has just replaced Professor Inderjit Singh as Chairman of NTUitive)
and Tan Min-Liang of Razer are the odd balls on Singapore’s wealth list because
they are actually creating wealth rather than investing it in one of the most
expensive pieces of real estate in the world. In a list of 50, we only have
five genuine creators of wealth.
When you consider
how the economic landscape has changed, this is not a good sign. Singapore
cannot repeat the old model of doing things cheaper than the West (China and
India have more people willing to work cheap than we have people). Sure, we can
rely on being the stable regional headquarters but once countries in the region
get their act together (reduce corruption etc), that may no longer be so
viable. We need bright sparks who can create wealth.
The government
always gets orgasmic whenever we get billionaire decides to become Singaporean.
Think of how excited we got when Sir James Dyson paid millions for a home.
However, what does that actually do for the rest of us, other than to remind us
that real estate is very expensive?
We need people
who can think. They don’t have to be native born, but they have to be able to
work with Singapore. I go back to my previous posting about Mr. Calvin Cheng’s
intellectual laziness in his dismissal of a liberal arts education in
Singapore. Liberal arts, don’t train you directly but they prepare you to
think. Let’s take note that societies that create music and art also happen to
be the societies that produce scientific innovation and entrepreneurship.
Mr. Li and the
team at Sea Limited have done more than just give parents hope that their video
games obsessed children might have a viable career. He’s also shown us that
Singapore needs people who can think and create wealth from game changing
activities rather than just sitting there and inheriting it.
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