The 1,000-year Plan

The Lee family has been selling its Lee Kum Kee sauces for 130 years. Sammy Lee is now thinking about the next millennium

- Shu-ching Jean Chen

While growing up, Sammy Lee heard all the stories—the family feuds, vicious lawsuits and broken hearts that had wracked the family’s LKK Group, famous for its Lee Kum Kee sauces. Back in 1986, his father, Lee Man Tat, now 87, was taken to court by his younger brother over control of the company. A similar episode erupted in 1972 involving Man Tat’s father and his two brothers. Familial ties were severed for good. In the late 1990s, Sammy himself battled to a two-year stalemate over his father’s plan to sell a money-losing unit.

Man Tat resolved the lawsuit by going heavily into debt and buying out his brother. More than 30 years later, he still controls 100 percent of the Hong Kong company, and that puts him on this year’s list of the city’s richest at No 11, with a net worth of $8.5 billion. Today, the LKK Group is the world’s largest manufacturer of oyster sauce and expects to be the largest soy sauce maker by 2020. It collects more than $3 billion in annual revenue and perhaps $150 million in profits, according to estimates by Forbes Asia.

But Sammy says its unit making Chinese health care products—which he co-founded—generates greater revenue and profits. It’s throwing off so much cash that it’s investing billions in real estate in Hong Kong, China and London. Sammy won’t disclose numbers, but overall the group likely posts between $6 billion and $7 billion in revenue and more than $600 million in profits each year.