It a great time to buy property in
Vietnam, says Jonathan Choi, whose successful
investments in the country since 1971 helped him rank No. 35 on latest Hong
Kong Rich List, with wealth of $950 million. “When the market is doing down,
that is the right time to get in,” he says.
Choi’s Sunwah Group first started
doing business in Vietnam as a seafood trader, processor and distributor. Today
it has two real estate development projects in Ho Chi Minh City–Sun Wah Tower,
a 22-story office building in the center of Ho Chi Minh City, in which Japan’s
Marubeni Corp. has a minority stake, plus Saigon Pearl, a massive complex
alongside the Saigon River. Sunwah also owns 20 hectares of land by the city’s
main airport.
But Choi isn’t done. Although Choi
has looked at investment proposals for other cities, his strategy is to stay
concentrated in one place. “Ho Chi Minh is a very important spot. Why go out to
other areas?” So Choi says he is looking to add even more properties in the
city’s business center.
Sunwah has a lot of Asian
experience. The business was founded by Choi’s father, Choi Kai Yau, who built
it into the largest seafood trader and distributor in Hong Kong. Today Sunwah
is a “sea to shelf to table” business that supplies frozen seafood, Japanese
food and also wine to 5,000 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau. Its Japanese
restaurant chain, Nishimura, has locations in Hong Kong, mainland China and
Southeast Asia. In Canada Sunwah has a chicken processing plant.
Yet the founder’s son has cast his
business net beyond the seafood and food business built up by his father.
“Basically, we have expanded into real estate into places where we did seafood
trading,” says. So today Sunwah’s property empire extends from Canada,
Cambodia, Macau and Hong Kong to mainland China (Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenyang,
Tianjin, Nanjing, Wuxi, Jinzhou, and Heshan). Choi also invests in highways and
bridges in China in Guangdong, Chongqing, Wuhan, Jiangxi and Huangpen.
Beyond real estate, Sunwah has
diversified into finance. The company is the majority investor in Kingsway
International Group of Canada, which is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
SW Kingsway Capital, listed in Hong Kong, is a subsidiary of the Canadian firm.
Not surprisingly, Choi’s financial
services interests extend into Vietnam, too. Sunwah Group has investments in
VinaCapital, a fund management company that focuses on Vietnam. VinaCapital
funds collectively have a total of $1.6 billion of projects in Vietnam, the
including London-listed Vietnam Opportunity Fund. From its recent low of
US$0.61 in December 2008, it has climbed to $1.56.
Horst Geicke, VinaCapital’s chairman
and an early investor in Vietnam, says it was in the 1990s that Choi saw the
potential for Vietnam to emerge as one of Asia’s largest economies. That
insight, combined with the similarities of Vietnam’s political and constitutional
system with China’s, made him comfortable as an early mover in Vietnam, Geike
says.
By Forbes Asia
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