Lui controls K. Wah Group, a closely held Hong Kong conglomerate that owns stakes in publicly traded casino operator Galaxy Entertainment and property developer K. Wah International. Galaxy is one of six gaming license holders in Macau, and competes against casinos Sheldon Adelson and Stanley Ho used to own.
Lui Che-Woo's net worth of $15.1B can buy ...
... and is equivalent to ...
The majority of Lui's wealth is derived from a 41% stake in Galaxy Entertainment, a Macau-based, publicly traded casino operator. He also owns 55% of Hong Kong-based K. Wah International, a property developer with businesses in China and Southeast Asia.
His shares in Galaxy and K. Wah are held by him and his family through holding companies and trusts registered in Hong Kong and Liberia. All of these shares are attributed to him because he's the founder and patriarch of the fortune.
The value of his cash holdings is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance. It also reflects his stake in Stanford Hotels through closely held conglomerate K. Wah Group. The hospitality business composes of more than one dozen hotels in the US and Hong Kong, including his first hotel, InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong.
Shelly Cheng, a spokesperson for Lui and deputy general manager of corporate affairs at K. Wah, declined to comment on Lui's net worth.
Lui was born in 1929, in the city of Jiangmen in Guangdong province, after his family moved back to China from San Francisco, where they had made a fortune running a laundry. Lui followed his family as they fled war-torn China for Hong Kong in 1934. After graduating from middle school, Japanese troops entered the city. At age 13, Lui began to support his family by selling food on the streets of the British colony.
In the 1950s, Lui began to buy surplus construction equipment from US forces in Okinawa and imported it to Hong Kong. When he couldn’t sell some stone crushers, he started a quarrying business. The 26-year-old then founded K. Wah Group, which has become Hong Kong's largest quarrying operator, according to the company’s website.
The billionaire next turned to property development, investing in his first residential project in 1962. He began building his first Hong Kong hotel in East Tsim Sha Tsui in 1979. The property was originally a Holiday Inn, and has since been rebranded as the InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong.
When Macau ended the four-decade monopoly of local tycoon Stanley Ho in 2002, Lui's Galaxy Casino Co., with Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands, won one of the three gaming concessions put up by the government. Within a year, the partners had split the license after a falling out over strategy: Adelson wanted to re-create Las Vegas in China, Lui wanted to cater to Asian tastes. StarWorld Macau, where gamblers can bet up to $250,000 a hand, opened across the street from Ho's Grand Lisboa in 2006. His $1.9 billion, 2,200-room Galaxy Macau resort opened after a two-year delay in 2011.
The nonagenarian has turned his attention to the golf course while his eldest son, Francis, runs his casino business. A younger son, Lawrence, leads the San Francisco-based Stanford Hotels, which owns eight Hiltons, two Sheratons, and three Marriotts in the US. His third son, Alexander, is an executive director of K. Wah International and oversees its Hong Kong properties. His eldest daughter, Paddy, is an executive director of both K. Wah International and Galaxy Entertainment, where his youngest daughter Eileen serves as director of human resources and administration.