In 2010, we had our HKBN management offsite in Germany and were inspired by our visit to a small farm that had been in the same family for centuries. When the farmer greeted us, he told us that he had just finished harvesting 80 year old trees that his grandfather had planted, and that he had just seeded trees to be harvested by his grandchildren in 80 years' time.

At HKBN, long-term focus is our corporate DNA. When we were awarded our fixed telecom network services licence in year 2000, our founding philosophy was “we are in a war with the incumbent” and as such, we would never win by leasing our weapon (network) from the incumbent, hence we had to build our own fibre network. This was contrary to conventional wisdom around the world at that time which favoured renting unbundled local elements from the incumbent network to facilitate short-term competition. Today, we are harvesting our long-term ownership in our own end-to-end network, resulting in the highest EBITDA margin amongst our listed peers in Hong Kong, which would not be possible under a rental model.

Whilst we don’t quite think in decades, we certainly invest in 3-5 year periods. In 2009/10, we initiated an industry price war, slashing our own broadband prices from around HK$200/month to HK$99/month, resulting in 135,000 net additions which dominated 123% of the total market gains, when it was still a vibrant four-carrier market. Today, those same HK$99/month ARPU customers are paying us in excess of HK$180/months on average. In the coming years, we will continue to focus on seeding our subscriber growth and expanding our fibre homes passed, with the aim of harvesting again in 3-5 years’ time.

We take a long-term view on investing in our Talents. We want our managers to be business leaders rather than specialists and as such, they have to be fluent in the common language of business. Over the years, we have invested heavily to educate our managers with various external and internal courses, such that the far majority of our senior executives today have post-graduate business related degrees. We are deepening our Co-Ownership structure that was started in 2012 such that our top 400-plus Talents of supervisor and above grades are invited to co-invest their family savings in equity of the company in a 3-year program, for alignment of interest with long-term shareholders.

We treat our suppliers as business partners rather than vendors because the best way for us to secure the lowest total input costs over time is to ensure that our vendors do well in partnering with us rather than just selling to us. For example, for our sub-contractors, we try to ensure consistent business flow and transparency in our forecast to aid their business efficiencies.