Life After Wristwatches

Can two brothers, one in Hong Kong and the other in Singapore, run rival hotel chains under the same corporate umbrella? These third-generation scions of a storied Indian family show how they do it.

- Ron Gluckman

Girish Jhunjhnuwala had one of those life-changing light bulb moments on a busy street in his hometown of Hong Kong. He watched as a pedestrian asked a man passing by for the time. The man pulled out a mobile phone, which was not yet ubiquitous back in the 1990s. Just like that, he recalls, “I knew the time was up for watches.”

Not all watches, of course, as the luxury market remains robust. But demand would plummet for the mass-market watches produced by his family, among Hong Kong’s biggest manufacturers. It had churned out some 500,000 watches a month for decades. “We liquidated everything,” says Girish’s older brother, Surya Jhunjhnuwala. “The decision was very painful, since our dad had built up the business since 1953. This was his legacy. But it was the right decision, and we both knew it was time. Many others in the industry lost money by hanging on. We had to reinvent ourselves.”

After time ran out on the watch business, the two brothers moved into property and hospitality. Both developed serviced apartments, but after yields peaked, they turned to hotels and are now riding the current hospitality and travel boom. They each run a hotel chain that began by offering hip boutiques packed with pop art and geared toward younger travelers. Now they have stepped up operations, targeting bigger properties for renovation and refitting them with features such as free mini-bars, happy hours for social net working and avant-garde interior designs. There’s ample competition. “A lot of big hotel brands have collections of these quirky hotels, like Accor’s MGallery collection,” notes Bill Barnett, managing director of Asia consultancy C9 Hotelworks. But Girish isn’t fazed: “We are more nimble than the big brands. We’re always experimenting.”