People like to say the business world is a battlefield. Weber Lo would rather call it a pitch. 

When he stepped down this year after eight years as Hang Lung’s Chief Executive Officer, he closed a chapter that had taken him from consumer goods to banking and, finally, to real estate. He puts it more plainly than a corporate biography would: he has done everything from selling diapers to selling flats. Each time the field changed, he found his footing quickly. The resilience and adaptability behind those transitions, he says, were forged through years of competitive sport. 

Weber is an athlete in the literal sense. As a schoolboy, he was selected for the Hong Kong youth table tennis team. At university, he represented Hong Kong in handball and captained the side. Baseball, lacrosse, and sprinting all had a turn. Sport taught him persistence, but also how to adjust with the team when the game stopped going to plan. 

Sitting down with the Hang Lung Archives, he talks about bringing that instinct into the Company: understanding the field, getting through the difficult years, and knowing when to change the play.  

Reading the Game

Weber joined Hang Lung in 2018 and found himself in a very different kind of match. "Real estate is a very slow, very long-cycle thing." From buying land to completing a project, seven or eight years is typical. Set against consumer goods or banking, the wait between what you put in and what comes back is much longer. 

He argued early that growth could not rest only on buying a site, digging a hole, and putting up another complex. The Company also had to look for returns that arrived sooner, building on strengths it already had. At the time, the Mainland market for development sites was running hot. On the surface, staying the course always seemed like the better choice.

Only later, as greenfield sites grew scarce and projects in the city center began to age, did urban renewal become the practical path. That thinking took shape as Hang Lung’s V.3 strategy: go deeper in the ten cities where the Company already operates. For Weber, this was not a decision to stop expanding. It was a way to make more of an existing base, bring returns forward, lower risk, and respond to a market increasingly focused on experience, not just floor area. 

Reading the game was only the start. The next eight years would test how Weber responded when the conditions on the pitch kept changing.

Attack and Defense

"When I joined, I never imagined things would turn this difficult." 

The fixtures were formidable from the outset. In 2018, tensions between China and the United States began to harden. In 2019, social unrest broke out in Hong Kong. Then came COVID-19, and it reached everywhere. 

Weber had already lived through the wave of bankruptcies around SARS in 2003 and the minibond fallout of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. He knew a company could not always be on the attack. "You also have to know how to defend." Even so, defending Hang Lung proved harder than he had expected. What he learned, he says, was crisis management in a "2.0 or even 3.0 version." He doubts people outside the Company can picture just how much those eight years contained. 

In office, he was dealing with sudden incidents across the Hong Kong portfolio, with pandemic rules that differed from city to city on the Mainland, and with scenarios that had to be redrawn as US–China relations shifted. Over the eight years, Hang Lung ran more than twenty stress tests. "Possibly more than under any chief executive before me." 

The tests were not only a way to get through the week in front of him. "Every crisis, every setback, is really equipping us for what comes next."

The Captain’s Job

What stayed with him through the headwinds was simpler than the scenarios. A company’s most important asset is still its people. 

When the pandemic began, Wuhan, where Hang Lung has a project, was the first city hit. Later, other cities faced other problems. Many of the decisions that mattered could not be made in real time from the Hong Kong headquarters. "I couldn’t make every decision myself." What he could do was give colleagues room to act, especially those closest to the market, so they could make the decisions that best fit their own city. 

In Weber’s view, Hang Lung has never been short of talent. The task is to let each person play to their strengths and turn ability into results. The best captain is not the one who scores every goal. It is the one who puts teammates in a position to play their best. 

Over those eight years, a number of Hang Lung’s projects rose to become the leading addresses in their cities. Weber is proud of that. What pleases him more is the belief the team came to share. 

"We don't put the asset first. We put the customer first." Under his watch, five principles became central to the way the team worked: Be Customer-Centric, Build a Hang Lung Branded Experience, Embrace Technology, Disciplined Execution, and Uphold Hang Lung Values. "We set these with colleagues when I took up the role. They still matter." 

The Next Match

Weber's time on Hang Lung’s pitch may be over, but there are other contests ahead. He laughs and says he hopes to move up from his daughter’s daddy to her caddy, and walk with her onto a course of her own.

He has not stopped caring about the Company he spent eight years with. He has only moved to a different position: from captain on the pitch to supporter on the sidelines. At his farewell, he put it lightly. "I’m a shareholder now. I’m happy when a dividend is paid." 

From representing Hong Kong as a young athlete to leading Hang Lung through eight years of shifting play, Weber has spent a career meeting the next challenge. He may have stepped off the pitch, but he is still watching the score. These days, rather than chasing the next victory himself, he looks forward to cheering from the sidelines and watching the team he helped shape lift the trophy.