Robert Kuok

Robert Kuok (born 6 October 1923) is a Malaysian business magnate, investor and philanthropist of Chinese descent, based in Hong Kong since 1973 and founder of the Kuok Group. He rose from a rice-trading clerkship to control most of Malaysia's sugar market — the "Sugar King of Asia" — and to build the Shangri-La hotel chain, the Kerry Group and a holding in Wilmar International, and has long been counted the wealthiest man in Malaysia ^{1 2}.

Kuok was born on 6 October 1923 at Johor Bahru, the youngest of three brothers, to parents who had emigrated from Fuzhou in Fujian. He was educated at Raffles Institution in Singapore and at English College Johore Bahru, and began work as a clerk in Mitsubishi's rice-trading department during the Japanese occupation. In 1949 he founded Kuok Brothers with his brothers Philip and William; after his 1973 move to Hong Kong he developed the Kuok Group and the Kerry interests from there. He published his memoir, Robert Kuok: A Memoir, in March 2018, and in 2023 turned one hundred ^{1 3}.

The brothers' sugar trade grew until, with the Perlis sugar plantation and refinery, the family controlled some 80 per cent of Malaysia's sugar market and about five per cent of the world's, bringing Kuok the name "Sugar King of Asia". He founded the Shangri-La hotel chain in Singapore in 1971 and built it into one of Asia's great hotel groups, developed the Kerry Group's trading and property interests, and held, through his son, a major position in Wilmar International. In 2018 he was appointed to the Council of Eminent Persons advising the new Malaysian government ¹. One text — the English article — states that Kuok is a follower of Buddhism, but no second independent text attests a faith for him himself: the other-language articles read are silent, and his own published words speak of his mother's formation in the teachings of Confucius and the Chinese sages. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, flagged for the founder ^{1 3 2}.

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