COVER STORY | GOLF
Dr Ken Chu succeeded his late father, David, as the chairman of China’s colossal Mission Hills golf and leisure empire in 2012
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The swing doctor David Chu was the visionary developer who planted the seed of golf in mainland China. That has blossomed into three vast golfing resorts and it is Chu’s son Ken who is now tasked with pruning them for further growth. By David Cushnan
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n 1992, Hong Kong investor Dr David Chu broke ground on a new project on the Chinese mainland, some 30 minutes from the border of the then-British territory. It was, all things considered, something of a gamble but Chu believed sincerely that the creation of a major golf resort on wasteground near the city of Shenzhen was a risk worth taking – an all-new resort, for an all-new sport in the country. He was right. The first shots were struck just two years later. Mission Hills was born and the face of Chinese golf was changed forever. Fast forward 20 years and Mission Hills has become the leading brand in Chinese golf, an internationally recognised symbol of golf in China and a thriving, pacy business, with three vast resorts, multiple revenue streams and extravagant expansion plans. The numbers are telling: across three south China resorts, in the cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan and, since 2010, on the island of Hainan, Mission Hills has built 22 golf courses since 1992. Two more will have been added by the end of this year. Factor in an array of surrounding facilities – hotels, conference venues, food and beverage outlets – in each location and it quickly becomes clear that the Mission Hills empire stretches well beyond golf, but the sport remains the DNA of the business, just as it was when Chu put the first spade in the ground and took his gamble. “His position was to promote international goodwill through golf,” explains Dr Ken Chu, son of the man who came to be known as the ‘father of golf’ in China and among the global golf community. When David Chu succumbed to cancer in August 2011, aged 61, the mantle passed to his sons, Ken and Tenniel. While Tenniel remains vice chairman of Mission Hills and an increasingly influential face in the
“Now it is up to me to help popularise the game of golf in China. I need to grow the business. I don’t want to sustain the business.” global golf industry, 38-year-old Ken, once the head of Mission Hills’ property development arm, has formally stepped into his father’s shoes as chairman and chief executive of the company. The next generation of Chus have taken on both the business and their father’s mission to develop the sport throughout China and beyond. “My father created this integrated leisure complex, featuring golf, world class travel and leisure facilities – what we call ‘golf and more’,” Ken Chu says now. “It’s more than a golf club. Mission Hills was a pioneer in introducing hotels, a lot of F&B outlets and conference facilities attached to the Mission Hills complex. Therefore it drew in a lot more customers and tourists. My father had a very courageous vision and was very forward thinking. He completed a world record in a very short time, only ten years: Mission Hills became the largest golf facility in the world.” More numbers: the 12 courses split across the Shenzhen and Dongguan sites, plus the additional facilities, and the newer Haikou resort on Hainan Island cover around 40 square kilometres in total, roughly the size of the English university town of Oxford. Mission Hills currently employs 14,000 people, including over 4,000 caddies, with those figures poised to rise. The facilities require a fleet of some 2,000 golf carts to cope with an average of 1,500 rounds per day and peaks of 3,000 – 70 per cent from China, with 30 per cent and rising from further afield. On peak days Mission Hills is less
a golf resort, more a complex logistical jigsaw, with Chu suggesting that getting 3,000 golf bags from hotel to tee, each at precisely the right moment, requires the same coordination and management as a baggage operation at a major airport. The figures and the scale are undeniably impressive, but Chu insists it is not simply grandstanding. “We did not build this facility for ego,” he says. “We built this facility because China has the largest population in the world.” As the son of the father, in more sense than one, Chu lacks nothing in ambition. The man who is, in his own words, “carrying Mission Hills forward” is a veritable bundle of energy. Conversation is swift, but always considered, and he describes his management style without hesitation as “pace and speed, pace and speed”. He is quirky, too, laughingly describing how he plays a round of golf for exercise, running between every shot to complete 18 holes and a full eight-kilometre workout in an hour. “My handicap is golf,” he chuckles. “To me, time is not money, time is use – it’s how much you can get done in your lifetime,” Chu explains. “My father had the incredible foresight in turning wasteland into the largest golf facility and was able to put China on to the world map of golf. Now it is up to me to help popularise the game of golf in China. I need to grow the business. I don’t want to sustain the business.” In its first two decades, there were three core strands to the Mission Hills
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COVER STORY | GOLF
Mission Hills: its five-point action plan to develop Chinese golfing talent
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here are fl ickering green shoots of promise amongst the youngsters who have grown up playing at Mission Hills. 23-year-old Hu Mu, who now practises in the US, and 14-year-old Guan Tianlang, who last year won the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship, a result which saw him earn a place at this year’s Masters at Augusta, are both graduates of the Mission Hills training system. As Ken Chu explains, Mission Hills has a five-point plan to develop more young Chinese golfers. 1. Recognisable faces “In the early years, we brought in a lot of international tournaments. In Asia we only got to see tournaments from the European Tour and the US Tour, so the faces became very recognisable. Bringing in these golf celebrities to help promote the game, to arouse the general interest, was the first thing we did.” 2. A collection of designers “We created a collection of international designers, all legends and well-renowned golf professionals. We worked with them on golf course design but we also created
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Since construction of Mission Hills first began in 1992, it has grown to become the biggest golf facility in the world
a lot of junior training series and tournaments with them, including Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Annika Sorenstam.” 3. Competitive action “Every year Mission Hills hosts over 20 junior tournaments. The way I see junior training is you need to give them more than just training at the academy, driving range and on the golf course. They need tournament experience.” 4. Free access “We have three golf courses designated as free access for 16-year-olds and below, free any time of the day, any week – just so people can come and play golf for free” 5. Amateur tournaments “We host 24 amateur tournaments on a yearly basis, so two a month. We know it will take some time for Chinese players to take part on the international platforms but we believe these five things we are doing, from the grassroots to the amateurs, and also being a medium in bridging the juniors and amateurs with the professionals, is beneficial to growing the game.”
business: golf, including golf operations, membership drives and golf tourism; real estate development, which has seen 3,000 properties so far sold around the resort, some for as much as US$20 million according to local reports; and a hotel and resort operations business, including the MICE [meeting, incentive, conference and exhibition] market. Chu, in order to expand the business, is in the process of adding three more: wellness tourism, commercial development and golf club management. While the latter is a natural extension of Mission Hills’ core competency – “there
are so many cities and city governments that come knocking on our door asking us to invest in their cities, because of our know-how, because of our database and also because of the tournaments we have,” says Chu, “and there are a lot of golf clubs in China that run on a deficit and they also need the expertise, the database, the sales and marketing engine that we have, to help them grow the business” – the other two areas represent significant departures. While Chu’s intention is for golf to remain Mission Hills’ core offering, he believes expanding the business can tap into the growing disposable income
available to China’s rapidly increasing middle class. In wellness tourism, for example, he has already overseen the opening of the world’s largest spa and mineral hot spring, including 168 plunge pools. It is in commercial development, however, where he is at his most ambitious. “By the end of next year we will be opening up another 800 shops, restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs, retail in the Mission Hills facilities,” he explains, adding that he expects Mission Hills to soon be the only golf club in the world with its own Imax cinema. Over the next two years Chu plans six new hotels, which
will be built in collaboration with some of the world’s leading chains. “I’m adding a lot more entertainment and lifestyle experiences into the facility,” he says, with no little relish. “If you imagine what Las Vegas looks like, that’s what I’m building – except for the gambling. “In a lot of countries the golf population is deteriorating. My analysis is people have more family values now. They don’t want to be away from families to play golf, because there is more responsibility. The second is people are much busier, with emails, BlackBerrys, people are working 24 hours a day.
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COVER STORY | GOLF
“There were only a handful of golf courses 20 years ago and now there are 698 golf courses in China.” “The reason why I’m adding so much into Mission Hills is so the father will not feel guilty for leaving the kids and wife when they go and play golf. You have to have something for everybody to do, a destination where people will want to go together. Mission Hills’ mission statement is to create and inspire happiness, healthy and harmonious lifestyle and experiences for all – just like Disney.” Backed by significant investment from governments around China keen to take a slice of the golf tourism market, Chu says Mission Hills is piggy-backing on the current Chinese focus on developing the Third Industry, or service sector, in the same way as city authorities previously promoted agriculture and manufacturing. “Leisure, tourism development is very well supported by the government and fi nancial institutions,” he points out. “That, plus all the real estate and development that we’ve been developing over the years has helped to pay for the growth of Mission Hills. It is a lifestyle we’re creating.” Almost casually, Chu throws into the conversation a plan for five more Mission Hills resorts, dotted around the Chinese mainland, to be built over the next five years, although not on the scale of the existing mega-developments. While building the Mission Hills business is at the heart of Chu’s vision, never far away is his desire to continue the rapid development of golf in China. Indeed, if Mission Hills was built, at least in part, to promote golf in China, Chinese golf has now come to rely on Mission Hills to spread its message. It has become a regular host of international tournaments, a run stretching back to 1995 when it staged China’s first international tournament, the World Cup of Golf. Before then, Chu says there were around 20,000 golfers in China; immediately afterwards the number swelled to around 100,000. Six years later Tiger Woods, then the world’s undisputed number one player, came to town for the
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first time, prompting another spurt. “Before Tiger came the golf population had grown to 500,000 and after Tiger it doubled to one million,” Chu says. In 2007, the World Cup – a now biennial men’s national team competition with two players per country – returned to Shenzhen as part of a long-term agreement which tied the competition to Mission Hills for 12 editions. Shenzhen hosted the tournament in 2007, 2008 and 2009, before it became a biennial event. The new Mission Hills Haiku hosted the 2011 edition. In 2012, meanwhile, Mission Hills Shenzhen hosted the WGC-HSBC Champions event, one of the four annual World Golf Championship (WGC) tournaments, for the first time – with the spoils taken by Ian Poulter. “All of these tournaments have helped the golf population grow, but also the number of golf courses in China,” Chu says, reporting that the number of regular golfers in China now exceeds three million. “There were only a handful of golf courses 20 years ago and now there are 698 golf courses in China,” he points out. “The game is still picking up but the word I would use is ‘snowballing’. “Obviously, golf in China is still in its infancy,” he adds. “Just like any other country, when golf began it was a very niche sport – it was a business sport. That is even more so in China. Golf is more than a sport; it’s a business language, it’s a social networking tool. What Mission Hills is doing right now, one thing I’ve done since my father’s departure is commission a new Mission Hills project for Mission Hills Hainan Island to become a public golf resort. That means there is no barrier, no financial barrier, no need to invest in a membership, to have the right to play golf. I’ve positioned that ten-course facility, 180-hole facility, to be all public golf, to help popularise the game of golf to the general public.” The development of junior talent capable of ultimately joining the professional ranks of the game will, Chu
Mission Hills: The scorecard
24: courses at three Mission Hills resorts, playable by the end of 2013 30: percentage of foreign visitors to Mission Hills 40: square kilometres, the size of the three sites combined 800: new entertainment properties to be opened by Mission Hills by the end of 2014 1,200: bunkers 3,000: rounds on a peak day 4,000: caddies employed by Mission Hills 14,000: employees at Mission Hills 100,000: golfers in China in 1995 3,000,000: golfers in China in 2012 insists, be accelerated by golf’s inclusion in the Olympic Games, with the promise of more funding from government and private enterprise. Mission Hills has predictably forged strong links with
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COVER STORY | GOLF
“It is a lifestyle we’re creating,” says Ken Chu of the ongoing – and evolving – Mission Hills project
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China’s national golf federation and it houses the Chinese national teams. “The golf club has a lot of the hardware and services,” Chu says, “but there’s so much more than the facilities and housing, such as medical facilities and equipment, psychology, physiotherapy, that goes into a sporting body and that comes from the sporting body.” Nonetheless, Chu maintains that “achieving some medals” when golf makes its Olympic bow in Rio three years from now is the ultimate, if distinctly ambitious, target. In other ways, too, he is doing what he can to try and develop Chinese golf at the elite level, including a push to try and have a Chinese player included in the President’s Cup, the biennial matchplay tournament between the US and a non-European international team. But as much as Chu believes in promoting golf in China, he also believes what has been created at Mission Hills will help the sport at a global level. “The way I see it is there’s only three million golfers in China,” Chu says. “What percentage is that compared to the number of people we have in China? It’s nought point something per cent. Look at the percentage in Great Britain, perhaps it’s 10 or 20 per cent. To begin with, for golf to be an international sport you have to have the support and participation of the Chinese nation. If the sport is only played in Europe and North America, it’s not an international sport. If we all want golf to be an international sport that means you need to have Chinese participation, because we have a quarter of the world’s population. We all know that the Chinese are explorers, we love to travel. If we are able to bring up the golf interest in China it will also help the tourism as well. We will be able to send much more golf tourism into Europe and North America, and any city welcomes tourism and welcomes golf tourism. This is not just about the game of golf, it’s about the tourism market.” Chu confirms there will be no physical international expansion of Mission Hills, at least “not in the next five years”. There is, he says, plenty of work still to do at home, building an empire, creating a lifestyle and popularising a sport. When China gets its first Major winner, though, Mission Hills and the Chu family will be able to take a healthy slice of the credit.