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Why the 137-year-old developer Hongkong Land is reinventing itself—and trying to loosen its ties to its home city
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In the mid-1990s, when Percy Weatherall was CEO of Hongkong Land and Michael Smith was a junior property cadet at Jones Lang Wootton, Weatherall offered Smith a job.
Key facts
- Earlier this year, Hongkong Land launched the Singapore Central Private Real Estate Fund (SCPREF), with assets under management of 8.2 billion Singapore dollars ($6.3 billion)
- The company swung to a net profit of $1.3 billion in 2025 from a net loss of $1.4 billion in 2024, boosted by an $890 million fair-value gain on investment property revaluations
- The fund holds Hongkong Land’s stakes in Marina Bay Financial Centre Towers 1 and 2, One Raffles Quay, One Raffles Link, and Asia Square Tower 1, previously owned by the Qatar Investment Authority
- Retail sales in March jumped 12.8% year-on-year. ( Deloitte forecasts Hong Kong’s retail sales this year to rise as much as 8% to around $52 billion.)
Summary
Three decades later, Smith sat in that same corner office, newly installed as the company’s CEO. But now, Smith is trying to loosen the ties between Hong Kong and Hongkong Land—a big step for a company that, literally, is named after its home city. “Hongkong Land has always been a proxy for Hong Kong’s office rents,” Smith tells Fortune in an extended interview at the company’s Central headquarters. Smith’s assignment, set by Jardine Matheson, which controls over 50% of Hongkong Land’s shares and is itself deep into a transition from conglomerate to capital allocator, is to turn the landlord into something closer to a fund manager, bringing in institutional co-investors to expand the company’s footprint across Asia’s gateway cities—and not Hong Kong.