Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Tony Tan CaktiongTony Tan CaktiongBorn 5 Jan 1953Philippines, fast food. Tan Caktiong opened an ice cream parlour in Cubao in 1975, added hot meals when customers asked for them, and turned it into Jollibee. Rather than copy American chains, Jollibee tuned its menu to Filipino tastes, with sweet-style spaghetti and its Chickenjoy fried chicken,…0i
  2. 2Henry SyHenry SyBorn 15 Oct 1924Philippines, retail and property. Sy started with a small shoe shop in Manila in 1958 and built the SM group around giant air-conditioned malls that became the public square of Filipino cities: places to shop, eat, attend Mass, pay bills and escape the heat. Owning the malls, the department stores…0i
  3. 3Socorro RamosSocorro RamosBorn 23 Sept 1923Philippines, bookselling. Ramos and her husband opened a small shop on Escolta in Manila in the early 1940s, and she built it into National Book Store, the country's dominant bookseller. Her model paired books with school and office supplies, which brought families in every term, and relied on hard…0
  4. 4John GokongweiJohn GokongweiBorn 11 Aug 1926Philippines, snacks and airlines. Gokongwei began as a teenage market trader in Cebu after his father died, then built Universal Robina into a maker of cheap snacks and drinks under the Jack 'n Jill name. In 1996 his group launched Cebu Pacific and later turned it into a low-fare airline, making…0i
  5. 5Dhanin ChearavanontDhanin ChearavanontBorn 19 Apr 1939Thailand, food and retail. Dhanin grew Charoen Pokphand, his family's Bangkok seed shop, into an integrated food company: CP supplies feed and chicks to contract farmers, buys back the birds, processes them and sells the food. In 1989 he brought 7-Eleven to Thailand, giving CP a nationwide shop…0i
  6. 6Robert KuokRobert KuokBorn 6 Oct 1923Malaysia, commodities and hotels. Kuok earned the name Sugar King by trading and refining sugar across Asia from the 1950s, building a regional network of mills, plantations and trading offices. He then used those relationships to open Shangri-La hotels from 1971. His model was the cross-border…0
  7. 7Tony FernandesTony FernandesBorn 30 Apr 1964Malaysia, aviation. Fernandes, a former music industry executive, and his partners bought the loss-making AirAsia in 2001 for a token sum and its debts, then rebuilt it on the low-cost model: one aircraft type, fast turnarounds, online booking and fares cheap enough to compete with buses. Under the…0i
  8. 8Anthony TanAnthony TanMalaysia and Singapore, transport and delivery. Tan, from a Malaysian car-making family, launched MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in 2012 to make taxis safer to hail, and it became Grab. Unlike Uber, Grab accepted cash, added motorbike taxis and adapted to each country, then layered food delivery and…0i
  9. 9Forrest LiForrest LiSingapore, games and e-commerce. Li founded Garena in 2009 to publish online games in Southeast Asia, then used the cash from its hit Free Fire, designed to run on cheap phones, to fund Shopee, launched in 2015, and the payments arm SeaMoney. Games paying for a loss-making marketplace until it…0
  10. 10Sim Wong HooSim Wong HooSingapore, hardware. Sim founded Creative Technology in 1981 in a Singapore shophouse, and its Sound Blaster card of 1989 became the standard for sound on IBM-compatible PCs, a rare case of a Southeast Asian company setting a global technical standard. Creative later struggled against Apple in…0i