11 - Broadening the Home Base

Summary

Liem was not afraid of taking risks and venturing into territory he didn't know much about. His modus operandi was to find the right partner who could run the new venture for him. Liem's talent laid in sussing out capable and experienced people who could help grow his stable of businesses. Mochtar Riady led the charge in banking for nearly fifteen years. Robert Kuok was “instrumental” in building up flour milling, while in cement Liem got start-up help from a Taiwanese partner introduced by Bangkok Bank's Chin Sophonpanich. Another area where Liem forged a beautiful friendship was in property, where he teamed with savvy developer Ciputra, who spearheaded property developments through a company partly owned by the Jakarta government, PT Pembangunan Jaya, and through Ciputra's PT Metropolitan Development.

PARTNERING A PROPERTY KING

Born Tjie Tjin Hwa, Ciputra rose from very simple roots to become Indonesia's best-known property developer. He seemed to possess the “tangan dingin” — the kind of “magic” business touch that Riady and Liem had. Ciputra, who started using that name at age twenty-five, was born in 1931 in the small town of Parigi in central Sulawesi (then known as Celebes). His father was from a different part of Fujian than Liem's village. He was brought to Sulawesi at age ten by Ciputra's grandfather who had migrated earlier and was a shopkeeper in the northern Sulawesi town of Gorontalo. Ciputra's father, a coconut trader, had married a woman who was part-Chinese, part-pribumi; their son did not have any Chinese education. As a child, Ciputra recalls he had to walk seven kilometres each way between his primary school and home. One day, when Ciputra was twelve, during the Japanese Occupation, his father disappeared. The family found out much later that he died in a prisoner-of-war camp. After the war, Ciputra went to high school, where he did well enough to win a place at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in West Java. The institute, where Sukarno studied, admitted very few Chinese students at the time. While studying architecture in Bandung, Ciputra showed strong entrepreneurial instincts; he sold baskets and hats made from palm trees, traded batik, and designed and sold furniture.