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Malaysia’s richest man Robert Kuok Hock-Nien’s daughter Kuok Hui Kwong has been made the Luxury Hotel Group Shangri-La Asia CEO. She will take charge of the hotel from 1 August.
Shangri-La Asia company is listed in Hong Kong and Singapore’s stock exchanges. According to an information given in the exchange, 47-year-old Kook has been working as the executive director of Shangri-La Asia and chairperson since January 2017.
Kuak has studied at Harvard University in America and is the sixth child of eight children of famous industrialist Robert Kook. He took over the command of the Shangri-La Hotel Chen when his former CEO Lim Beng Chi left the post in 2022. However, Lims remained as a non-executive director in the board. Hua is married to Bryan Gaw and has two sons.
Kuak gets the basic salary of 576,000 Hong Kong dollars (about 73,376 US dollars) every month under his current contract, besides they also get performance bonus and pension. He has more than 5 percent stake in the Kerry Group, which is the major shareholder company of Shangri-La Asia. Shangri-La Asia Company operates and manages more than 100 luxury hotels worldwide. Its four brands include the names of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, Kerry Hotels, Jane and Traders.
The company started in 1971 as a hotel in Singapore. The company’s total income in 2024 stood at US $ 2.19 billion, which is 2 percent higher than last year. However, the company’s net profit declined by 12.3 percent to US $ 161.4 million in the same period. The company said in the information given to the exchange that hotel business in Hong Kong and Philippines has improved, but China, Singapore and UK have declined, which has affected the profit.
By the end of 2023, Shangri-La Asia was employed in about 25,500 employees, which is 2.3 percent less than the previous year. However, in an attempt to support employees during the Kovid-19 epidemic, the company gave the “lowest trimmed” in the hotel industry, Kuak gave this information in an interview in 2023.
Apart from this, Kuak also worked as CEO of South China Morning Post from January to June 2022. This newspaper and its associated media companies bought by Alibaba Group in 2015. At that time these companies were under the Kerry Holdings, the main company of the Kuak family.
According to Forbes magazine, in 2025, Robert Kuak’s total assets were estimated at US $ 11.4 billion, making him the richest person in Malaysia.
