Many expatriates have slipped away from Hong Kong in recent years, either apprehensive about the effects of the 1977 handover to communist China, or because of the decline in opportunities as the former British colony plunged into recession. But Brian O'Connor, a relatively recent arrival, has bucked the trend. As many foreigners left, this gwailo, as Hong Kong Chinese call Europeans, prospered and expanded his business interests.
The Belfastman founded Quality HealthCare Asia Ltd in 1997, and in the space of two years has made it into Hong Kong's biggest private health-care provider and the territory's first-ever listed health-care company. He created an integrated health-care company "because I guess no one else has done it before, and I just enjoyed doing it," he said over lunch in a restaurant overlooking Victoria Harbour. "I'm never quite sure, to be honest, why I start some of these things. It just was a blindingly obvious opportunity to create a structure within which you could bring together different disciplines of health care, create a much more efficient administrative function and allow the doctors to do what they're good at, and to move into areas which are of great need here like the care of old people." The handover has not changed the business climate in Hong Kong, he said, though the recession had made doing business tougher, especially high real interest rates.
"The territory is going through a necessary economic adjustment. Costs got too far ahead of reality. We are in real competition with other countries so we have to re-invent Hong Kong. But I have said to many people over the years that they really ought to get themselves out here and use the entrepreneurial ability and skills they have learned elsewhere because there are opportunities sitting here. There are genuine opportunities for Irish people and others. There is a need in Hong Kong for advice, consultation and expertise." One of a Catholic family of 13 from Leeson Street off the Falls Road, Brian O'Connor began his business career at the age of 16 in 1961 with Williams Travel. He got involved in setting up companies to fly people from Belfast to Toronto, New York and Spain, an innovation in the late 1960s. He founded a travel agency and tour operating business on the Isle of Man, the Palace Hotel and Casino Group and in 1987 launched CrestaCare plc, now one of the largest private health-care providers in Britain. Mr O'Connor was invited to Hong Kong in 1992 by Allied Group Ltd, a Chinese conglomerate in trouble with the regulators and in need of a gwailo to straighten it out. Having accomplished this he retired as chairman in 1997 to devote himself to his new venture, which has a Northern Ireland flavour.
While many of the senior management of Quality HealthCare Asia are Hong Kong Chinese, there are two other Belfast accents to be heard in the boardroom: those of Mr Philip Kirkwood, chairman of the elderly services division and Mr Ian Strachan, one of three non-executive directors and a former Hong Kong Director of Social Welfare. The company got off the ground in 1997 by acquiring the established British practice of Drs Anderson & Partners, the businesses of Dr Henry Lee & Associates and the IPNS nursing services. This provided a total of 183 practitioners at 106 Hong Kong locations. Turnover in 1998 was 331 million Hong Kong dollars (€40.33 million). "By the end of this year we will have 2,000 beds in the elderly care business and we only started with 300 last December," said Mr O'Connor who plays a prominent role in Hong Kong's Irish Business Forum, a business network group.
"We are already the largest medical services business. We had 28 members on our team this time last year; now we have 500 people. We're one of the few companies in Hong Kong which has been expanding rather than contracting and that's because it's a new area of business which desperately needs organisation.
"It is also an unusual company in that we actually are genuinely doing good for the people we look after, as well as making money from them which we then reinvest. The fundamental principle we operate under is that the doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct. We have learned the lessons from America where the very large health-care companies have often interfered for example in the doctor's choice of what drugs or what treatments he can proscribe.
"We have deliberately gone the other way on the principle that not only is it morally right, but from a hard-nosed business point of view it is incredibly good sense to make sure your patient is happy because just like any customer in the consumer business, if your customer's happy you're going to get more." Quality HealthCare Asia set out to integrate medical services, facilities and services for the elderly; nursing, home care and dental services and physiotherapy and medical equipment supply in Hong Kong. It is now branching out to include a Chinese medicine clinic at the Baptist University and expanding rapidly into care for the elderly at a time when waiting lists for government-funded care are steadily lengthening and Hong Kong's demographics point to a growing aged population. The company made a loss in 1997 of 36.16 million Hong Kong dollars, due partly to corporate redundancies. Several staff in the old medical practices were laid off in the mergers, and the company turned a net profit in 1988 of 22.16 million Hong Kong dollars.
Mr O'Connor said his policy was based on buying businesses which were run by doctors. "They didn't leave, they actually came into the company and took shares in the company so they didn't sell out, they sold in," he said. They recognised "that they did not have the business ability to manage the change, to manage the investment necessary to offer the right sort of efficiency that people expect these days." Some 80 per cent of business now comes from corporate clients who "want efficiency above all, they want to know that their employees are going to be looked after properly with no waiting time, with improvements in productivity rather than reductions in productivity, as they don't want down time. It is in our interests to make sure people stay well, rather than treat them only when they are sick."
Like all good business ideas his corporate strategy is very simply, putting together assets which together become more valuable than the sum of the parts. By integrating GP services, specialists, dentists, physiotherapy, nursing at home and nursinghome care, "we created a value far beyond the individual value of each of those segments". The cost of acquisitions was about 200 million Hong Kong dollars, he said, "but the stock market thinks it's worth at least 650 million". Mr O'Connor has an apartment in Hong Kong and visits Ireland about once every six weeks to tend to his interests in Belfast and Dublin, where he is non-executive director of Dunloe Ewart plc - and also to look up his six brothers and six sisters and occasionally to relax in his 10-acre residence in Douglas, Isle of Man. He follows Northern Ireland politics avidly and raises funds for the University of Ulster in his capacity as chairman of the Northern Ireland Educational Foundation.
"How can anybody from any part of Belfast, but especially west Belfast, not be willing to give their time and energy to helping that sort of project?" he said. Otherwise he plays some golf off a 16-handicap and follows Formula One racing, particularly Eddie Jordan. Asked if Hong Kong was his home now he responded quickly: "No, Ireland's my home. Hong Kong is the place that I live and work. And my wife Rita would certainly regard Ireland as home." With his business interests he is often on the road or in the air.
"I try to score points by spending time with my wife," he said. "I score 10 points for remembering to phone her during the day and so I phone her frequently, and I score 20 points for taking her out to dinner. It's probably 2,000 negative at the moment. She says the secret of our 30-year marriage is that I've only spent half of that time with her, because she wouldn't put up with me for 30 years."
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