SINGAPORE - Everyone believes that as surely as night follows day, Richard Li will take over the helm at Hutchison Whampoa, the Hongkong conglomerate controlled by his billionaire father. Well, Richard Li, youngest son of Li Ka-shing, is out to prove everyone wrong. He turned down the job of managing director after Simon Murray resigned last year, and went on to set up his own company, Pacific Century Holdings.

"I'm not interested in being the managing director of Hutchison, and Canning Fok (Mr Murray's successor) is not warming the seat for me," he says.

He sees the running of a well-established conglomerate like Hutchison Whampoa as an "extremely unexciting" task compared with the fulfilment of building up his own business from scratch.

His father was initially "very disappointed" at his decision, because like all dutiful Chinese sons he was expected to take up the mantle of the family business.

Richard's elder brother, Victor, 29, had already assumed an executive position at Cheung Kong Holdings, the tycoon's flagship property company.

To appease his father Richard agreed to take an oversight role as Hutchison's deputy chairman, but he adds: "I'm not taking a dime out of being deputy chairman ... I return every cent of the director's fee to the company - my job is mainly here (with Pacific Century)."

He brushes off the suggestion that his decision to strike out on his own stems from a need to get out of the old man's shadow, to prove his own mettle. "There is no shadow. I would like to run my own type of company, it's a personal desire," he says.

It is difficult to see how Richard Li can pursue his grand plan of bringing innovative telecommunications services to developing countries in the region without setting up on his own.

His father and incumbent Hutchison boss Mr Fok are not overly bullish on telecoms ventures in the region, except for the Hongkong and China markets. They ordered a halt to subsidiary Hutchison Telecom's regional expansion in October 1992, and the laying off of 30-40 employees.

Richard Li was in a relaxed, genial mood during an interview with BT recently. Sitting in his spacious but Spartan office on the 38th floor of The Concourse in Hongkong he looks the picture of sartorial elegance in his starched Oxford-stripped shirt and aquamarine tie.

He speaks with a clipped British accent, which has occasioned much curiosity in the past because of the fact that he has spent almost half his life in the United States, including 10 years' of education.

Although he refers occasionally to notes prepared for him by public relations man Arnie Tucker, Richard Li, in conversation, exudes confidence far beyond his years. It is not every day one comes across a 27-year-old who moves with ease among some of the most powerful political and business figures around.

He has talked technology with Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, discussed business plans with Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, negotiated a US$525 million (S$803 million) deal aboard a yacht with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and disputed business terms with cable TV king Ted Turner.

Having one of Asia's richest men for a father obviously opens many doors. But Richard Li's confidence has also been honed by the years he was left to fend for himself in a foreign country.

Before his 14th birthday, his father sent him to prep school in Menlo Park, California, put him up in an apartment and left him very much on his own. He sold ice cream, waited tables during vacations and made his way to the top school in that state, Stanford University, where he studied computer engineering.

After graduating in 1987, he joined Gordon Capital Corporation, a merchant bank in Toronto - but only for three years before he was recalled to Hongkong to join Hutchison.

Star TV was his baby from the start. His father was present at the launch, came a couple of times to the office to address the troops and to pick up the son for their regular Monday dinner together. Even when the network was sold, Li Ka-shing was not informed until the deal was done.

The first pan-Asian satellite TV network was born in 1990 amid much scepticism. This was the first time satellite TV was being made available not for one but for 30-40 countries. It was a project more ambitious than any in the West.

Star was also unique in that its signals were to be transmitted by the lower-capacity C-band rather than the Ku-band, which is more powerful and allows recipients to use smaller dishes.

There were as many doubting Thomases as there were teething problems. How could a free-to-air regional TV network succeed? Who was going to advertise in a medium where there was no independent means of gauging market penetration.

Even the Hongkong government was nervous. It has long wanted to make the territory a regional broadcasting beacon.

Richard Li says "we even indemnified the Hongkong government. We were so sure about the fact that we were complying with telecommunications rules under the charter of the United Nations".

Despite the obstacles, things moved at a frenetic pace - no less because Richard Li was a taskmaster of the first order. "If anyone had time after managing Star, it was to grab five more minutes of sleep," he recalls.

Five channels were launched, the premier ones being the news channel provided by the BBC and the MTV music station which made its Hongkong-based deejays instant celebrities among teeny-boppers from Bombay to Beijing.

In building up Star, Richard Li displayed the same entrepreneurial fleet-of-foot which turned his father in just four decades from a plastic flower seller to Hongkong's Superman, as Li Ka-shing is nicknamed.

Initially, it was tempting to focus Star's marketing and distribution efforts on Taiwan, the most lucrative market, and show a profit within 18 months.

But this would have reduced Star to no more than the fourth Taiwanese TV station with a couple of million viewers instead of the pan-Asian platform it was to become, reaching out to 40 million homes, with market value at the point of sale of US$825 million, or six times Hutchison's original investment.

Star also earned Richard Li a reputation as a brash, arrogant upstart who wants what he wants when he wants it.

There were reports of his famous temper, and how he reduced men twice his age to tears. He was said to scream and yell at executive meetings, a charge he does not deny but which he puts down to inevitable tension arising from the brainstorming of ideas.

His supporters defended his aggressive style as necessary to keep the new company on track while his detractors dismissed them as the misplaced tantrums of a spoilt brat.

Most agree that they carried on working with him because he compensated them well for their efforts and he was doing something refreshingly new and challenging. And it is said he has mellowed considerably after Star's profitable sale.

"He's got a lot of confidence from the Star deal and that's why he has calmed down," a business associate says. One lesson he has learnt from the Star experience, Richard Li says, is to "slow down a tad" in going after the targets he hopes to meet at Pacific Century.

He takes particular pride in the fact that Star was created, organised and managed without the presence of foreign partners. He relied on a cosmopolitan mix of nationalities, including old hands like Michael Johnson and Steve Moss, as well as on research offices in the US and Canada to keep abreast of technological changes.

Richard Li maintains that if he had have been sole owner of Star he would have kept the network, because he believes its potential has yet to be unleashed. Star undoubtedly needed a major infusion of funds over and above the US$110 million already pumped in to get it to the next phase of growth.

Disagreeing with the suggestion that he sold Mr Murdoch a dud, he says: "You can put this on record, let me make some money within the transaction and I'll buy it (Star TV) back."

Before then, Richard Li hopes to make as much impact with his new corporate vehicle, Pacific Century, as he did with Star.

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