Li Ponders Naming New CEO
His rise was mercurial, his fall spectacular.
Now one of Asia’s best-known business whiz kids, 34-year-old Richard Li, says he may be ready to give up day-to-day responsibility for running Pacific Century CyberWorks, the once-promising start-up he launched onto the Hong Kong stock market with such flare barely two years ago.
In comments to several newspapers last week, Li said he was considering turning over the job of chief executive to fresh blood, most likely after the company’s 2001 results are announced next spring. He indicated he would stay on as chairman, a job that concentrates on longer-term planning.
“He’s said he’d consider appointing a CEO,” PCCW spokeswoman Joan Wagner said Friday.
Wagner also confirmed reports that the company had retained corporate search agencies--sometimes referred to as headhunters--to help locate high-level executive talent to join the PCCW board, but denied the search was focused on a replacement for Li.
“We’re not seeking to replace Richard Li right now,” she said.
In an interview Thursday, Li said he “may consider recruiting a managing director or chief executive” after a year, but stressed he would remain chairman.
Li’s remarks follow some of the most difficult months of the young entrepreneur’s life. His initial vision of building a go-go “new economy” company that would dominate emerging fields such as interactive television across Asia appears to have largely unraveled.
In many ways, Li’s fate has merely personified the inflated hopes and hard realities that have hit Asia’s dot-com sector since the high-tech investment bubble burst in the United States last year.
In just 13 months, Li has gone from the cover of Time magazine’s Asia edition, which hailed him as “Super Boy” for the entrepreneurial flare he showed at the time, to a visible liability for his company’s future.
“In image terms, his departure may be positive for PCCW,” said Trevor Jones, the head of research at Indosuez W.I. Carr Securities in Hong Kong. “A lot of retail investors are very angry with him.”
The anger is understandable.
Two years into his venture, PCCW has turned into a heavily indebted, old-style telephone company surrounded by a few hopeful joint-venture companies and an array of highly questionable Internet holdings. More worrisome for investors, analysts who follow the company say they detect no clear strategy for the future.
The stock price is 90% off its peak value and in late March, PCCW stunned the markets by announcing a loss of $886 million for 2000 on sales of only $935 million.
If this weren’t enough, Li faced the humiliation of having to admit he had not graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer engineering as stated in corporate literature, but had dropped out before completing a degree.
