Asia Tea Time - #92 ☕

Daddy and son disagreements at CDL and how to get kids into money

Author

Tim Phillips
March 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

This week I talk CDL’s embarrassing and public family spat as well as how to get your kids started on money matters.

Macro in Asia

CDL Chairman’s former PA and board adviser is source of family dispute

The family tiff that has gone public between the Chairman and CEO of Singapore’s publicly-listed property development company City Developments Ltd (SGX: C09), or CDL, saw its latest twist.

According to CDL CEO Sherman Kwek – son of CDL Chairman Kwek Beng Leng – the source of the very public dispute is Kwek Beng Leng’s former personal assistant and a current board adviser, Dr Katherine Wu. 

Why it’s happening

  • CDL is currently in crisis as Chairman Kwek has accused his son Sherman of trying to engineer a coup to oust him.

  • This was obviously brought about by CEO Kwek’s resolution to terminate Dr Wu’s advisory board agreement – where she’s currently advising the board of Millenium & Copthorne Hotels (M&C), a subsidiary of CDL.

  • Daddy Kwek was not too happy with this but issued a statement on Wednesday (26 February) saying that his son and other directors have agreed to stop taking any further action after a court hearing.

Why it matters

  • Whenever a listed company has a Succession-like feud take place in full view of the public, that it’s not exactly great for the company’s share price.

  • CDL shares were actually suspended from trading on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) on Wednesday 26 February in light of this feud between the family members.

  • All the drama puts the spotlight on the poor corporate governance of a lot of these family-run listed businesses in Asia, particularly ones overseen by boomers and their offspring.

What’s next?

  • It will be interesting to see whether this Dr Wu will retain her role as an adviser to M&C’s board and whether she’ll still be paid by the Chairman – as she’s not actually an employee of the company.

 Tim’s Take

All the tea that is being spilled in the CDL drama is really happening because the elder Kwek took offence that his special “friend” and advisor was about to get the boot from CEO Kwek and other board directors.

Deeper questions and doubts remain, of course. Apparently, Dr Wu has been a long-time advisor to Chairman Kwek, going back three decades. She studied Music in the US and released her own albums when she returned to Taiwan, where she’s originally from, before moving to Singapore in 1992.

She also ran her own kindergarten business but sold it after a decade to focus more time on hotel management. Ok, that kind of establishes that she had no background or experience running hotels or property but was made an adviser to the Chairman of a massive property firm – so far, so normal, as corporate governance failures go in Asia.

It’s also interesting as it reinforces just how poorly shareholders are treated by management at family-run businesses. CDL itself is a master in the art of shareholder destruction.

CDL’s share price is down 45% over the past decade. Some poor investments into the China real estate sector, alongside the broken and outdated business model of property developers, has meant that long-term shareholders of CDL have been taken to the shed.

Similar to Hong Kong property developers, while property prices in Singapore may be rising or doing well, that’s not reflected in share prices of developers. Indeed, they’re typically some of the worst companies to own in Asia.

If Warren Buffett had a “too hard” pile – for companies he doesn’t fully understand so wouldn’t invest in – he’d likely have a second bucket that could be labelled “too toxic” for companies (like CDL) that he does understand but would avoid no matter what.

For those that aren’t CDL shareholders, though, it’s a good lesson in why family feuds just add another layer of complexity and unnecessary drama to a company’s prospects. It will be interesting to see how it plays out but the likely end result is that nothing will change within CDL.

Tim’s Money Tip of the Week

For those of us who have kids, one of the biggest challenges we can face as they get older is how to introduce the concept of money to them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean just investing but also saving, spending, budgeting, and other areas like insurance or mortgages. 

While topics like Maths and Science are taught extensively in secondary schools, we don’t actually have specific courses or subjects aimed at financial literacy.

But understanding your basic rate of interest on a housing loan, or grasping the average return of global stocks over 10-20 years, will impact our kids’ day-to-day lives on a significant scale in future.

Starting small if key. Introduce the topic of money to kids as early as they can start understanding it. Weekly pocket money – perhaps tied to doing things around the house – can help instil a logic that actually earning money is tied to some form of work.

Beyond that, encouraging kids to save their pocket money and discussing the concept of “delayed gratification” (which many of us adults can also be guilty of not practicing!) helps to frame money as something that can grow/compound over time.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is to actually invest it. Saving it and then leaving it in an account that yields just 2-3% interest each year isn’t going to increase wealth substantially over the long term.

Practicing good money habits ourselves also goes a long way to teaching our kids how to view money in a healthy manner. Remember, a lot of our own money habits today were formed when we were being brought up by our own parents..