He may be nearly 80, but billionaire businessman Peter Woo remains as vital and visionary as ever. He has spent five decades proving that true power lies not in what you accumulate but in what you create for generations to come. Tatler sits down with the man who embodies Hong Kong’s resilience—and refuses to stop building
There is a particular quality to the way Peter Woo moves through a room—not with the swagger of someone who has built an empire, but with the grace of someone who understands that legacy is built in the margins—the quiet spaces between ambition and action. At 79, he possesses a defiant vitality that makes one reconsider the boundaries we place on human potential. His handshake is firm, his gaze direct, and there’s a glint in his eye that suggests he’s perpetually three moves ahead in a game most of us don’t even know we’re playing.
This is not the Peter Woo of corporate press releases. The Woo Tatler sits down with was sent alone, as a 12-year-old boy, on a journey around Europe by parents who believed that real education is what happens when you’re forced to navigate uncertainty without a safety net. That boy grew into the man who would build a conglomerate that touches nearly every corner of
Hong Kong life.
When Woo arrived at the University of Cincinnati in the mid-1960s, he was the only Asian man on campus. Surprisingly, he didn’t major in business but studied physics and maths instead. Within five years, he had become something of a campus legend: senior class president, and intramural champion in volleyball, American football, badminton and table tennis. After getting his MBA from Columbia Business School and spending some time in finance, he returned to Hong Kong to join his father-in-law YK Pao’s World-Wide Shipping Group in 1975. But he didn’t demand a title or salary; he asked instead for time to learn about the industry. “Learning is what energises me. The more you learn, the more opportunities surface,” he tells us. It’s a philosophy that would define his entire career—soon, the opportunities began to multiply.
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Peter Woo (Photography: Hungmc)
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By 1986, aged just 40, he took over the management of two of his father-in-law’s companies, Wheelock & Co and its subsidiary The Wharf. While others saw Hong Kong as merely a property market, Woo envisioned it as a living ecosystem. He expanded into luxury retail, luxury hotels in Hong Kong and mainland China, container terminals and commercial property such as Times Square and Harbour City. He understood, long before it was conventional wisdom, that there was a bright future in integrated experiences. This wasn’t intuition or chance, Woo says. “[Leadership] takes lots of practice. But the more you practise, the luckier you get.”
In 2018, Woo opened The Murray Hong Kong, a Niccolo hotel, one of the city’s most ambitious heritage preservation projects, transforming a 1960s government building into a 300-plus-room luxury hotel. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and while markets convulsed with uncertainty, the then 74-year-old proposed taking Wheelock private, offering shareholders a 52 per cent premium—an unusually generous offer, but a bold move that signalled his belief in the future of the city.
Yet to focus solely on Woo’s business acumen would miss the fuller picture. Over decades, he has served Hong Kong with the same intensity he brought to building his enterprises. He chaired the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Council, helmed the Hospital Authority—where his generosity helped establish a pioneering cancer centre—and led the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. In 2012, the government awarded him the Grand Bauhinia Medal, its highest honour for public service.
