Who is Jimmy?
Not everyone likes Jimmy. Most people don’t understand him. Some are scornful of him.
Jimmy was my boss. He is also a friend, a mentor, and a hero.
In 2004, two friends and I co-founded the Lion Rock Institute. We believe our start-up think tank might get some help from Jimmy. I wrote him an email. Almost immediately, he asked me to see him.
“Simon, come, work for me. You must learn how to do business if you believe in freedom. Everything else is just empty talks.”
So I began working in Apple Daily. It turns out to be the best education in my life.
A Humble Beginning
Jimmy was 12 in 1959. China was experiencing the Great Famine.
Jimmy and his family often went for days without food. He hung out in Guangzhou train station, hoping he might find some odd jobs.
One day, a stranger from Hong Kong gave Jimmy a piece of chocolate.
“It was the best thing I ever had in my life,” Jimmy recounts, “Hong Kong must be the best place on earth.”
Determined to live a better life, Jimmy smuggled himself to Hong Kong on a fishing boat. In the evening he arrived, he found a job in a garment factory and started working right away.
Jimmy had nothing but freedom.
A Curious Soul
Jimmy loves food. He is always hungry, not only for food but also for knowledge and ideas.
Although he did not have a formal education, Jimmy is the most intelligent person I know. He taught himself the ins and outs of running a business. Today, most people see him as a freedom fighter. But he is first and foremost an entrepreneur.
Jimmy founded Giordano in 1981. It had hundreds of shops in Hong Kong and China in a few years. At the time, no other fashion chain operated on such a scale and scope. Zara, H&M, GAP, and Uniqlo were not quite household brand names yet.
The business world later called what Jimmy started “fast fashion.” Most businesses did not even have fax machines back then, but Jimmy invested tens of millions in IT and ERP. Giordano’s insanely efficient inventory control means low cost, affordable prices, and unbelievably turnaround time for launching new products.
The Calling
Jimmy became a Hayekian after reading The Road to Serfdom. He believes in the free market, and he lives by what he believes.
The 1989 Democratic Movement in China changed Jimmy’s outlook. When students in Beijing were going on hunger strike, Jimmy mobilized resources at Giordano to produce T-shirts with the faces of the student leaders overnight. He donated all the proceeds from T-shirt sales to support the student movements.
Garment factories make clothing. The fashion business turns what we wear into statements. But if T-shirts can say something profound, wouldn’t the message be even louder and clearer in printed words?
After the Tiananmen crackdown, Jimmy started Next Magazine in 1990.
In 1991, in his column, Jimmy called Premier of China Li Pang “an asshole.” The Communist Party was furious and threatened to shut down all Giordano’s shops in China.
Jimmy sold all his stakes in Giordano’s in a heartbeat. He cashed out and distanced himself from the fashion business. This is how he protects the business he founded.
He never looked back.
Apple Rebel
Before Next Media came into the scene, Hong Kong’s media industry was mostly free. But media bosses had ties with the elites. Many closed-door and under-the-table went unreported.
Next Magazine’s independent journalism changed the status quo.
Many of the elites were scornful of how we threatened their fabricated persona. They also understood it would be better to have watchful eyes like ours, especially when we were getting closer to the handover.
In 1995, Jimmy started Apple Daily.
Why do you start a newspaper when you have a magazine? It turns out running a newspaper takes the challenge to a different dimension. But if you can overcome the hurdles, the newspaper was a much more profitable business.
Apple Daily was the first newspaper in Hong Kong to print in full color, with intuitive design and graphical content. We strived every day to make our front page an objet d'art, a collector's piece.
Over the years, in many public rallies in Hong Kong, people held up Apple Daily’s front page of the day as protest placards. Apple Daily has always been an integral part of Hong Kong people’s collective memory. For a long time, in the ordinary sense, when people say Apple in Cantonese, they were referring to our newspaper, not the company that makes iPhones.
Going Digital
During the peak of the dot.com bubble in 1999, Jimmy ranked one of the top ten wealthiest people in Hong Kong. Had Jimmy exited and pocketed the money in 1999, he could have been bathing under the sky and drinking Dom Perignon all day for thousands of years.
The story would have ended here.
Jimmy instead kept reinventing himself and the company. It might be the most productive period of his business career.
When Amazon was only an online bookseller, Jimmy invested billions to build Hong Kong's first e-commerce platform and a fleet of delivery trucks.
Before internet advertising was a viable business, Apple Daily had a website.
When youtube had only cat videos, he wanted to produce hundreds of video content with 3D animation every day.
While MySpace and Facebook were vying to be the leader in social media, he experimented with a hyperlocal spatial platform.
Jimmy has a lot of ideas, too many of them. Many of his ideas turn out to be billion-dollar business propositions. He was just way ahead of the time.
There was always resistance internally against Jimmy’s seemingly otherworldly ideas. The managerial staff was reluctant to carry out the plans. They thought Jimmy’s ideas were not realistic, too costly, and might jeopardize the company’s existing businesses.
“We are Hong Kong’s most profitable newspaper. Why do we bother to change so frequently and so drastically?” some colleagues complained behind his back.
“We must find out what the possibilities are. Profit is the consequence, not the cause, of what we do,” he said.
In 2015, Next Media changed its name to Next Digital.
Fighting a Good Fight
It is not easy to work with Jimmy. It is stressful. At times his ideas are hard to understand.
Jimmy borrows from Henry Ford’s playbook. He always pays his staff way above the market rate. I’ve never heard anyone at Next Digital complain about salary.
We also had some of the most absurdly generous benefits. For instance, Next Digital subsidized its canteen operated by Michelin Star restauranteurs. Our staff paid only half the price for food.
It was not only about business. Jimmy genuinely cares about people, and immensely so. He loves food. He believes everyone loves food.
Speaking from my personal experience, both as a columnist for Apple Daily for 17 years and as the head of various business divisions, Jimmy’s personnel policy pays off. If you are a journalist, your works at Apple Daily are likely the most prideworthy part of your career. If you played other roles and functions, your experience at Apple Daily is always an essential part of your professional identity.
Since 2007, businesses advertised with us would receive phone calls from people with connections in the mainland, reminding them that the government did not favor Apple Daily. If these businesses continue to advertise with us, there might be political implications.
As advertising-income continued to dwindle, Apple Daily could be viable only by transforming our business model radically. In 2019 Apple Daily introduced paid subscriptions. In only three months, we hit 800,000 subscribers. It was a feat that deserves its own business school case study.
Jimmy and Hong Kong
On Jun 30, 2020, the last day I worked on my column, I had the worst writer’s block in 17 years writing career. It was the day before Beijing imposed the Sedition Law on Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong shouldn’t need any hero,” this was the only line I had on my computer screen. I stared at it for the whole afternoon.
“I know the deadline is in. I am sorry. I cannot write,” I texted my editor to apologize.
Then I texted Jimmy to tell him I was about to leave Hong Kong.
“You should go. Now. It is not safe here anymore,” Jimmy texted back.
“What about you?” I asked.
“I cannot leave. If I leave it would send a very wrong message to the world,” Jimmy said.
He knew what would come after him. But he chose to stay.
In an interview with ABC, Jimmy said,
I knew it would come. I did not know that it would be so fast. I'm almost 73, it's a payback time. Whatever happens is a redemption. I came here with $1, escaped from China when I was 12. This place gave me everything.
Jimmy’s story is also the story of Hong Kong. If Hong Kong is free, Jimmy will be freed.