A Practical Dreamer

For years, Alex Jiaravanont fuelled his creative passions working as an architect and artist, but when he finally joined the family business— Thailand’s enormous CP Group—he found that corporate could also be cool

- Eric Wilson

On the 64th floor of Two IFC tower in Central, with its sweeping views of Victoria Harbour, Alex Jiaravanont sits in an office that is spare but enormous, wearing a tightly tailored suit over a loosely buttoned shirt. The 46-year-old executive and former architect is a third-generation member of the Bangkok-based dynasty behind one of Asia’s largest conglomerates, CP Group, and has played an important role at the company as an advisor to several investment funds from its Hong Kong offices since 2015. But he keeps a lower profile than might be expected for someone whose family has topped lists of Thailand’s richest for decades.

“I’m actually a very private person and so getting written up was not, I mean ... I don’t do it very often,” Jiaravanont says. “But a lot of people didn’t realise CP has a division in Hong Kong, so we see this as an opportunity.”

Jiaravanont might be a little shy, but he does not exactly go unnoticed. As tall and angular as a fashion model, with his head shaven clean to the scalp, he wears a heavy ring in the shape of a tiger, and when he leans forward, a considerable tattoo of an intricately coiled snake peers out from his chest. “On my side of the family, everybody thinks I’m the creative one,” he says.

“He has a lot of tattoos,” says Amy Ho, a lawyer and a business partner of Jiaravanont in, of all things, a collection of handbags called Esemblé that he designs in his spare time.

“No, not a lot,” he says. “A couple.”