Mention the name KP Ho or, to be more precise, Ho Kwon Ping, and you will find people sitting up more attentively, ready to listen to the man who has become an elder statesman in the Asian corporate scene.
However, there are several interesting facts about Ho that most people are not aware of, and it is these aspects of his life that he spoke about at the 2025 Singapore MICE Forum where he shared a number of key life lessons with attendees.
In this TDM Exclusive, we share with you his thoughts on life, his work, and the challenges he encountered on the way to the top.
A different sort of beginning
Unlike many Asian success stories which involve a rags to riches rise to power, Ho’s own tale actually begins with the privilege of being able to grow up overseas and in more than one country.
Born in Hong Kong, Ho spent much of his childhood in Thailand, with the occasional trip to Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States where he eventually went to study.
While still uncommon in today’s world, this sort of upbringing is standard for the children of diplomats or those who migrate overseas to find a better standard of living.
In Ho’s youth, however, it was practically unheard of and unusual; to the point, alas, that he often felt like an outsider.
As he recalled: “Growing up, my rather unusual upbringing I think has influenced me in many ways, but it's not pivotal as such because it's a long process. I guess I've come to realise whenever I'm in Singapore that people get together for meetings and they talk about their school days and then they ask which school you came from. When they come to me, they always guess it wrong because I never attended that school in Singapore. I began to realise early on that I'm a complete outsider to everybody, and that used to make me feel quite uncomfortable wherever I was. I grew up in Thailand, and I'm very familiar with Thailand now; I speak the language relatively well, but I'm still an outsider in Singapore.”
Ho also pointed out that, while he has been in Singapore for most of his adult life, he only came to the country to do his National Service.
As a result, he would often lament the fact that he felt like an outsider everywhere he went; nevertheless, he realised that being the odd one out was more of an advantage rather than a hindrance.
As he puts it: “In retrospect, that has allowed me insights into being quite flexible wherever I am. And I think that's partly. That's part of the reason why Banyan Tree has been relatively successful as an Asian company compared to the Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and other hotel brands that have tried to grow from Asia, because they're very much rooted in a relatively parochial view of life.”
Now, years later, Ho declares that he is now as comfortable in Singapore as he is in Mexico, Cuba, and just about anywhere among the 31 countries the Banyan Tree Group operates in.
Lessons from the lock-up
It is interesting to note that the mogul behind one of the world’s leading luxury hospitality brands actually had a serious brush with the law, earning him two months in solitary confinement in 1977.
At the time, the 24-year-old Ho was a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and was subsequently accused by the Singaporean Internal Security Department (ISD) for violating the country;s Internal Security Act through the publication of pro-communist articles.
As he wrote in his 2018 book Asking Why: Selected Writings of Ho Kwon Ping: “I was surrounded by plainclothes officers, who put a hood over my head, and drove me to an undisclosed location. I was informed that a detention order has been served against me, and I could be held without trial for two years.”
For Ho, the two months he spent in solitary confinement proved to be a pivotal moment in his life.
As he opined: “If you're in solitary confinement, it’s totally solitary: it's just a little prison cell with no windows; the lights are always on, and you're there confronting yourself, except for interrogation which you look forward to in order to have some human contact. You begin to realise who you really are and are not, and that was quite pivotal for me as a young person at the age of 24. That allowed me, I suppose, at other moments in my life later on to stop myself again and ask myself: ‘Are you really you or are you doing something that's not genuinely you?’ It gave me the insight later in life to reflect as to whether you are the authentic you or not; and that's been the impact on me.”
Lessons from an accidental businessman
Ho wryly pointed out that his wife tells people that she thought she married a journalist, not a businessman.
Indeed, he admits that, despite an education centred on economics and development, he never had an interest in business.
However, that all changed when his father had a stroke in 198; Ho had to let go of a position at global business school INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France to take over the family business.
He recalled how, at the time, most overseas Chinese, Southeast Asian companies would be mini-conglomerates: industrial jacks of all trades, but masters of none.
Ho said about the family’s Wah Chang Group of Companies: “We were into manufacturing, engineering, electroplating; a regular mish-mash of businesses in several countries within ASEAN. To make a long story short, I had to kill off every one of them because this was just before China came onto the scene and, back then, we were doing a lot of contract manufacturing for other people and trading, too.”
As he now tells young entrepreneurs, the worst thing for anyone, businessman or otherwise, to be in life is to be just a trader, a mere agent for someone else’s business.
He said: “You're given targets that every year you have to achieve and, if you achieve it too well, they eventually take back the agency from you."
Pushing 30 at the time, Ho found the situation both stifling and frustrating; but, as the eldest son of a family in business, resignation was never a given.
Following his father’s passing, he decided to take some time off and went for a holiday in Phuket, Thailand.
As he recalls: “Phuket was really primitive in the 1980s; I bought a piece of land over there just kept on going. At this point, after having gone through all the unsuccessful businesses, I decided that whatever new thing I was going to do had to have a brand. Because, in my point of view, we had nothing that was proprietary to us. In my worldview, there are only two things that you can own that's proprietary to you: one would be technology, if you can patent it; and the other is a brand. You own that brand.”
Ho decided at the time to build a business that would have a brand, though he did not know as yet what it would become.
He said of this: “Thanks to various things happening, I accidentally found that I could try to create a brand out of the hotel business; and that's how Banyan Tree started.”
Onward, ever onward
Since establishing what is now the Banyan Tree Group in 1994, Ho has continued to move from strength to strength.
Decades after he was incarcerated, the Singaporean government honoured his services to the country by awarding him the Meritorious Service Medal and the Distinguished Service Order.
In 2010, he also became the first Asian to receive the American Creativity Association Lifetime Achievement Award as recognition for his creativity, innovation, and excellence in a diverse range of fields.
Over the next two years, he would be named Singapore’s Top Thinker at the Yahoo! Singapore 9 Awards and receive CNBC’s Travel Business Leader Award for the Asia Pacific.
Ho has achieved all these and more by keeping abreast of what’s going on in the world around him, keeping an open mind and a willingness to do things differently.
As for the advice he imparted to his audience, it was both simple and impactful: “Don’t sleepwalk through life; make an impact, have a purpose.”
