HKUST Business School Magazine

When it comes to the evolution of family offices in Asia, we are now at a critical juncture where family businesses must decide on a way forward. According to Maximilian Ma, Chairman of Lee Heng Diamond Group, and founder and Chairman of MaBelle Jewelry, navigating these difficult seas start with defining your family values. “To define a set of family values, you need a kind of compass,” Ma says. “You need to define ‘true north’, and you need to have a magnetic needle which points you in the right direction. That way you’ll always get where you need to go, because you have ‘true north’ and your compass to guide you. I think this idea plays a very important part in the transition,” he says. Ma believes that once a value that can act as ‘true north’ is found, future generations will be able to use it to carry on the family legacy while moving forward in their own way. But how does a family find its ‘true north’? Ma says that it’s up to everyone to find their own version of it. The topic is relevant for governments, universities, individuals and businesses alike. Many entrepreneurs who started their businesses in the 1950s or 1960s are now reflecting on their success and looking at ways of transforming the business for the next generation. “In Asia, I think more than 98 per cent of businesses are family owned, although perhaps not in terms of market value. I think a lot of owners are anxiously thinking about what’s going to happen to the business that they created, or their father created. They want to know how it is going to move forward,” he says. The younger generation think differently Ma says that to answer the question of how to move forward himself, he had to accept that things might progress in a different way to what he had anticipated. The younger generation have been exposed to more influences, and been offered more opportunities, than his generation, so they see the future differently. Ma himself had more opportunities than his own father, he notes. His father died when he was only 12 years old, and he took over his successful diamond trade business. To keep the company successful, he developed a new vision for the business, and disrupted the industry by creating large-scale retail chains that offered fixed-price, widely affordable and fashionable diamond jewelry that could reach a broad demographic. The result was the widely successful MaBelle store that boasts over 50 shops in Hong Kong and 40 in Mainland China. Ma says that while the older generation may have only been influenced by one school of thought, future generations come with a mixed bag of Eastern values and Western ideas that inevitably influence how the family business transition takes place. Biz@HKUST 21