Forbes Asia

Welcome to the April/May issue, featuring not one but two rich lists, the World’s Billionaires and Korea’s 50 Richest. We have features spanning the region and industries: one on recently minted Korean fintech billionaire Lee Seung-gun of Viva Republica and another on the husband and wife team who founded AI firm Appier in Taiwan. Two more profiles come from Hong Kong, on billionaire property tycoon Edwin Leong and a companion piece on Janice Lee, the CEO of PCCW’s Viu streaming service, which is successfully competing against the likes of Netflix and other global giants. As often happens, these narratives don’t seem connected beyond the entrepreneurial success of the first three, and corporate success of Janice Lee. What seems in fact to link them is exactly the randomness behind their success. One…

The crypto world heaved a sigh of relief regarding President Biden’s new executive order on the industry. Those positive feelings are misplaced. For months the digital-asset industry has been on tenterhooks as the Biden Administration prepared an executive order on how the government would deal with the explosive growth of crypto assets. In five years their total market cap has grown 300-fold to more than $3 trillion. Crypto enthusiasts feared Washington would take a regulatory sledgehammer to the industry. Instead, the order seems to provide sensible frameworks for dealing with this phenomenon. Many industry participants recognized that regulations of some sort were coming and were thus delighted that Uncle Sam would be taking a reasonable, responsible approach. Alas, despite soothing words about the desire to “reinforce United States leadership in the global financial…

• The Leopard at des Artistes 1 West 67th St. (Tel.: 212-787-8767) This former Special still is. The Howard Chandler Christy murals are as robust as ever, and the Italian cuisine is equally fulsome. A spaghetti special with sun-dried tomatoes and a Parmesan sauce is a tangy lead-in for the pollo arrosto with Swiss chard and Calabrian peppers. The venison is extremely tender. The flourless chocolate mousse cake with caramelized hazelnuts is the perfect finale to your evening. The maître d’ runs a tight ship, and the service is excellent. • Petite Boucherie 14 Christopher St. (Tel.: 646-756-4145) Looking at the decor and tasting the French fare here and at big brother Boucherie West Village (99 Seventh Avenue South), you could easily pretend you’re in Paris. Everything from grilled octopus to lamb chops to steak…

Can we afford to be confident about the global economy? Most of us, barraged by headlines about war, inflation, fuel spikes, chip shortages, political unrest, a growth-stock collapse, an IPO dearth and resurgent coronavirus cases in China and Hong Kong, would say no. The global economy looks gravely wounded. But let me flip the question: Can we afford not to be confident about the global economy? Confidence, after all, is a mood, not a fact. It’s always a smart financial exercise to challenge our moods with their contrarian opposites. Example: Fast-growth internet stocks like Sea and PayPal had been significantly overvalued since 2016 and crazily so since mid-2020. Both are fine companies, but they were priced for perfection. Then more so, as they continued to float up for another 18 months.…

As Yu Chih-han navigated a spot in a Boston parking garage in 2010, he knew there was a better way. Years earlier the computer science student had designed AI software for a self-driving car for a university competition. “That’s the moment I felt we had to make AI not just a thing in academia, but more broadly available for business,” says the 43-year-old cofounder and CEO of Taipei-based SaaS firm Appier. Together with his wife, COO Winnie Lee, they have done just that—representing a new generation of tech talent in Taiwan that has found success outside the island’s mainstay hardware industry. The pair have scaled Appier into a billion-dollar software company (the only others to achieve unicorn status in Taiwan are electric scooter developer Gogoro and software firm 91App). A public…

All of 2020 and half of 2021, I was working until 2 a.m. every day because I was writing the code that runs the company,” says Grant Petty, CEO and founder of Blackmagic Design. 53-year-old billionaire isn’t kidding. He despises outsourcing, so he literally writes all the SQL programs that run internal processes at his 1,500-employee, $576 million (revenue) Melbourne, Australia–based company. He’s also known for starring in hourlong instructional videos for Blackmagic products like the Ursa Mini Pro 12K digital cinema camera. When the pandemic struck, Blackmagic (which manufactures all 209 of its products itself, unheard of in the hardware business unless your name is Samsung or Sony) needed to share parts among its three factories in Australia, Singapore and Indonesia. Rather than hire someone, or even delegate the task…