Jimmy Lai
| Jimmy Lai | |
|---|---|
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| Native name | 黎智英 |
| Born |
8 December 1947 (age 69) Guangzhou, Guangdong, China |
| Occupation | Founder and Chairman, Next Digital |
| Net worth | US$1.2 billion |
| Website | Next Digital |
| Jimmy Lai | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 黎智英 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Lǐ Zhìyīng |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Jyutping | lai4 zi3 jing1 |
Lai Chee-Ying, better known by his western name Jimmy Lai, is a Hong Kong entrepreneur. He founded Giordano, an Asian clothing retailer, and Next Digital(Formerly Next Media), a Hong Kong-listed media company and a Chinese-language media group.
Born 1947 in an impoverished family in Canton, Kwangtung, China with family roots in nearby Shunde, Lai was educated to fifth grade level.
Smuggled to Hong Kong aboard a small boat at the age of 13, Lai worked as a child-laborer in a garment factory for a wage of $8 per month.
Rising to the level of factory manager, Lai speculated his year-end bonus on Hong Kong stocks to raise enough cash to buy out the owners of a bankrupt garment factory, Comitex, in 1975 and began producing sweaters. Customers included J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, and other U.S. retailers.
By rewarding sellers with financial incentives in Hong Kong, he built the chain into an Asia-wide retailer. Giordano was said to have more than 11,000 employees in 1,700 shops across 30 territories worldwide.
Owing to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Lai became an advocate of democracy and critic of the People's Republic of China government. He distributed Giordano T-shirts with portraits of student leaders and began publishing Next Magazine, which combined tabloid sensationalism with hard-hitting political and business reporting. He went on to found other magazines, including Sudden Weekly(忽然一週), Eat & Travel Weekly(飲食男女), Trading Express/Auto Express (交易通/搵車快線) and the youth-oriented Easy Finder (壹本便利).
In 1995, as the Hong Kong handover approached, Lai founded Apple Daily, a newspaper start-up that he financed with $100 million of his own money owing to investor fear of association with a critic of the Mainland China government. The newspaper's circulation rose to 400,000 copies by 1997, which was the territory's second largest among 60 other newspapers.<citation required>
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