The progeny of Hong Kong's super rich tend not to wander far from the family firm. In a report issued this year, CLSA, an investment group, identified 19 Hong Kong companies in which a family patriarch would soon be making way for a son or daughter.

With a total market capitalisation of US$110bn, the changing of the guard at these companies will mark a massive wealth transfer from one generation to the next. Yet one name on the list stood out from the rest - Richard Li, chairman of PCCW. Unlike most of his silver-spoon peers, including his elder brother Victor, Mr Li has dared to venture out on his own.

Among self-made men and women, it is a truism that their first million dollars was their hardest. And while Mr Li never had to worry about his first million - or even his first $100m - he did forge his own path when he could have chosen a smoother one within the empire controlled by Li Ka-shing, his father.

At his father's Hutchison Whampoa flagship in the early 1990s, Mr Li was credited with brokering the sale of Star TV to Rupert Murdoch for a tidy US$400m profit. Armed with about the same amount in seed money, Mr Li established Pacific Century, his own vehicle, Mr Li's highly-leveraged buy-out of C&W Hongkong Telecom at the height of the dotcom craze in 2000 is one of Asia's most famous company sagas. And PCCW's subsequent struggles with a heavily indebted utility is one of the region's greatest corporate anti-climaxes.

The company found itself under siege from competitors backed by an industry regulator - the Office of the Telecommunications Authority - determined to make the sector Hong Kong's most competitive major industry.

People close to PCCW discerned a clash of cultures between HKT's entrenched engineering types and the suits that swept in with the new, western-educated chairman.

PCCW's property ventures, pursued through the 2004 spin-off of Pacific Century Premium Developments, confirmed that Mr Li's inherited Hong Kong wheeler-dealer streak had not abandoned him. The successful roll-out of PCCW's NOW broadband TV business, its acquisition of local mobile company Sunday and the sale of a 20 per cent stake to China Netcom also suggested that Mr Li was back.

Thanks to Macquarie's unexpected $7bn-$8bn offer for PCCW's telecoms and media businesses, Mr Li is again presented with the opportunity for a fresh start.

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