by Dr. Iain
Corness
The
chairman of the Wisepower Group, which is developing the La Royale Beach
Project at Jomtien, is the affable Eric Lai. A relaxed and happy man who
says, “By nature I am a positive character. I am happy. There are good
years and there are bad years, but I am enjoying life.”
However, there is a lot more to Eric Lai than someone
who is sitting back in the deckchair of life, watching the world go by. To
start with, Eric was born Eric Lai Kwong Fai and he began the interview by
describing himself as “a typical Hong Kong product, born and educated
there.” But the typical Hong Kong product, as can be seen by his own
ancestry, did not originate on Hong Kong Island, but came as refugees from
communist China. Chinese immigrants with nothing, other than their own
innate talents.
Eric’s father did have a talent - he was an artist.
That talent he passed on to his son. “I was crazy about art, and
that’s why I did architecture at university,” said Eric. He almost did
not make it to university. Like many a young student, he was lax in
applying himself to his school work, after all, art was more fun, but
finally he did pull up his socks and in his final year he topped the
school.
Following graduation with Honours and Distinction he
settled into the life of an architect in an office. This kept him
interested for a few years, but Eric felt there was more out there that
life could offer him. “I began to become fascinated by marketing and PR.
I wanted to create something,” said Eric, using his hands like an
Italian as he waxed enthusiastic about the concept, continuing, “Being
just a designer I was only working on a very small bit of a large
jigsaw.”
He could see that the larger jigsaw was in the
corporate world, and so he joined the Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels group,
the holding company for the Peninsula hotel group. Very quickly his innate
business sense was evident and he became the executive director of the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels group, overseeing a an increase in annual
profit on property-related revenue from HK$ 24 million to over HK$ 650
million in nine years.
As part of that expansion, he began visiting Thailand.
His role was to look for opportunities of expansion for the group. “I
liked Thailand a lot,” said Eric. “Instead of buying one piece of
land, we bought four!” He continued, “In the 1980’s I came over
every week. I was fascinated by the opportunities. I liked the people I
dealt with and the potential in starting something here.”
I asked Eric if he could speak Thai when he first came
over and he admitted that he could not, but this was not a bar to
business. “Bangkok is a gateway city in the region. It is very
cosmopolitan and it was not difficult to get by.” These days he has some
Thai, but not enough for every situation, but Eric says, “I’m well
covered by my executives and staff. We use English (and sometimes
Cantonese) in the office.”
There was another factor that made business dealings in
Bangkok attractive for Eric. “The Thai-Chinese like dealing with the
Chinese. It almost made me feel at home!”
The potential that Eric could feel, and the relative
ease of doing business, were enough for him to resign from his position as
executive director in 1990, to come to Thailand to work on his own
projects.
He began with a partnership with the ex-chairman of the
Peninsula group and they developed the Empire Tower in Bangkok, which at
56 storeys was the tallest office building in the capital.
Shortly after this he met the Sahaviraya family that
had, in Eric’s words, “A nice piece of land beside the Chao Phraya.”
That “nice piece of land” became the start of SV City, the largest
single phase development in Bangkok. “The first building was finished in
1996. Then came the financial crisis of 1997,” said Eric. That would
have been the start of what positive Eric called “the bad years”!
Eric Lai continued to be positive, however, and began
to put much effort into the Wisepower Group, of which he is also chairman.
“We wanted to make ourselves a little different,” said Eric. Being
developers meant starting from a concept that included a mixture of buying
and selling, understanding future needs, construction and sales and after
sales service. “It’s a one-stop concept,” said Eric.
That concept is carried out by three separate sections
of Wisepower. “We have an engineering company to do the design, but the
final design has to be signed off by architect Eric. “It’s my hobby
these days. It’s fun,” said Eric with a wide grin. “Then there is
the development company, under its managing director, Khun Sombat
Chancharoensin. I’m behind Sombat,” said the increasingly busy Eric.
“There is a third firm, too, that does sales and leasing and property
management. I have an MD to be in charge of that,” said Eric.
I gained the decided impression that Eric was a hard
working chairman who had his fingers on the pulse of each of these
sections. This was reinforced by him saying, “I don’t look just at one
aspect of any development. I have to develop a long term relationship
too.”
Eric Lai has been resident in Thailand for many years
now, and is seriously considering Thai citizenship, in his long range
plans. Other long rangers deal with the direction he feels the company
should head, but he did say that he considers that many projects on the
Eastern Seaboard are very viable. “I have the instinct for which way we
should go, but I have to remain flexible.”
Amongst his ambitions is an abstract concept of wishing to do something
for society that could eventually be self-supporting. “Then I’ll go
back to art,” said the energetic Eric!
