His hospitality empire is worth over $200 million

Growing up, Ho Kwon Ping never thought he would become a businessman, let alone a hotel tycoon.

“I didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur,” he told CNBC Make It. “It’s just that a few times when I started working for other people, it didn’t really work out … I’m quite an individualist. I became an entrepreneur more out of a lack of other avenues.”

Today, the 72-year-old is the founder and executive chairman of the Banyan Group, a hospitality company with a portfolio of 12 global brands, more than 80 hotels and resorts, along with spas, galleries and residences spread across more than 20 countries.

The company, which is listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, brought in about S$328 million (about US$242 million) in revenue in 2023. Banyan Group has a market capitalization of S$300 million, according to LSEG data.

Ho shared something about himself that some may find surprising: He was imprisoned in his youth.

He said his early life was largely defined by a strong zeal for social activism.

While working toward his undergraduate degree at Stanford University in the early 1970s, he was an outspoken student activist against the Vietnam War (also called the “American War” in Vietnam).

He joined other protests on campus—notably, one against American inventor and physicist William Shockley, which eventually got him suspended from the institution.

“I was kicked out because of my participation in the Black Student Union, a protest they had against a guy named William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing semiconductors but who also had a weird view of eugenics. He wrote some books saying that black people should be sterilized,” Ho said.

As a result, Ho was tried by a campus judicial panel and found guilty of suppressing academic freedom, leading to his suspension from the university. He then decided to leave Stanford and returned to Singapore, where he performed national service and resumed his undergraduate studies.

“I had to start from scratch and it was really boring, so I started writing as a freelance journalist [for] a now-defunct magazine called the Far Eastern Economic Review,” he said. “I started writing about Singapore politics, which the government didn’t like. So I was imprisoned under the Internal Security Act for being pro-communist.”

This was in 1977 and he was put in solitary confinement during his two-month prison sentence – a time he describes as “frightening, lonely, depressing and reflective”.

After his release, Ho rejoined the magazine as a reporter and moved to Hong Kong with his wife, Claire Chiang. The newlyweds moved to a small fishing village on Lamma Island, there called Yung Shue Wan, which translates to “Bay of Banyan Trees”.

“I wasn’t paid very well, so I couldn’t afford to live on Hong Kong Island or Kowloon … so we had no choice but to live on Lamma Island,” Ho said. “Even though we weren’t rich… we had three very idyllic years there.”

Ho was born in Hong Kong and spent most of his childhood and adolescence growing up in Thailand before moving to Singapore. His father, Ho Rih Hwa, was a businessman who co-founded Thai Wah Public Company and headed the Wah Chang Group, conglomerates with operations across Asia.

“Although my parents were quite well off, I was always a bit of a rebel and wanted to be independent and so on,” he said.

In 1981, Ho’s father had a stroke. As the eldest son, Ho took on the responsibility of taking over the family business.

“That business was a true microcosm of Chinese overseas businesses, meaning a jack of all trades but master of none,” Ho said. “We had about 10 to 12 different businesses from construction to contract manufacturing of televisions … even Adidas shoes, and so on.”

After several major failures and lessons learned in running the family business, Ho had an epiphany – instead of running a “bunch of businesses”, he wanted to focus on building his own brand.

“Then I decided that contract manufacturing is not a long-term solution. You have to own the customer, and you can only do that by owning a brand or owning a technology, and I’m not a technologist, so I decided we had to own a brand,” he said.

The stars aligned when one day in 1984, Ho encountered a large piece of coastal land at Bang Tao Bay in Phuket, Thailand. He decided to buy the 550-plus hectare site, which turned out to be an abandoned tin mine, according to an official company statement.

After years of restoration, Ho worked together with his wife and brother – who is an architect – to design and develop several hotels and resorts on the property. Laguna Phuket, Asia’s first integrated destination resort, opened in 1987, according to the statement.

“We designed the first hotel and got a Thai company to manage it. A second hotel – Sheraton managed it, and the third and fourth and so on,” Ho said. “And then the last part of the land had no beach [so] nobody wanted to manage it”.

“That was when the light bulb went off and I said: Well, since no one wants to manage it … why don’t we launch our own brand?”

To compensate for the lack of a beach, Ho decided to build private villas with a pool for each.

“This was 30 years ago, so the notion of a ‘pool villa’ hotel didn’t exist … we also pioneered the ‘tropical spa,'” he said.

In 1994, the group’s flagship luxury resort Banyan Tree Phuket opened its doors, including the first Banyan Tree Spa – a name inspired by the happy years Ho spent with his wife at Hong’s Banyan Tree Bay Kong.

“Innovation doesn’t fall from the sky … it was a response to a need,” he said.

In 2006, Banyan Tree Holdings Limited debuted on the Singapore Stock Exchange and in 2024, Banyan Group was launched as an umbrella brand for the multi-brand portfolio, according to a company statement.

“People have asked me if I’ve sold or not, and I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown. The kinds of things I used to do, you can’t keep doing them forever. You will go to jail forever. and you’re also not effective,” Ho said. “But what we wanted to do in terms of social change, I think we’re actually doing through Banyan Tree.”

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