“There are heroes and there are legends. Heroes are remembered but legends never die.” —Boney Kapoor
In his time, the late John Robinson Lim Gokongwei Jr. (1926-2019) was a class act—a legend who built a business empire from the ground up.
His life story though can be aptly summed up in a six-word phrase; from riches to rags to riches.
In between the transitions lied an epic struggle to make it to the top against the big players who would do everything to foil his attempts. Yet his successes were phenomenal—as a banker, trader, investor and philanthropist.
His JG Summit Holdings Inc. has extensive exposures in air travel, power generation, publishing, real estate and property development, petrochemicals, telecommunications, hotels, food and beverage, livestock farming and animal feeds and banking.
John was wont to sharing his beginnings in Cebu City where the family lived in the early 1900s.
“I was born to a rich Chinese-Filipino family. I spent my childhood in Cebu where my father owned a chain of movie houses including the first air-conditioned one outside Manila. I was the eldest of six children and lived in a big house in Cebu’s Forbes Park,” he recalled in a speech at the Ad Congress.
He would go to school in a chauffeured car at the San Carlos University where he graduated on top of his class. He tried to secure his Master in Business Administration at the De La Salle University in Manila, but had to drop out due to economic constraints.
He also briefly studied at the Harvard Business School, but that’s going ahead of our story.
All the opulence enjoyed by the family in Cebu dissipated with the passing of his father when the younger John was only 13.
“I felt angry at the world for taking away my father, and for taking away all that I enjoyed before. When the free movies disappeared, I also lost half of my friends,” he narrated.
The banks seized the family wealth over unpaid loans. With the car and chauffeur gone, John had to walk more than three kilometers to school every day.
To help support his younger siblings, John sold peanuts in the backyard of their modest home. Sensing that selling peanuts wasn’t enough, John decided to sell candies, candles and threads at a public market that wasn’t near by any measure.
He was making P20 profit daily, and John felt good about it.
“The pesos I made at the palengke [market] were the pesos that went into building the business I have today,” he said.
And he concluded; “If I can compete with people so much older than me, if I can support my whole family at 15, I can do anything.”
So he ventured into bigger, bolder stuffs, driven by a strong conviction. “The important thing to know is that life will always deal us a few bad cards. But we have to play those cards the best we can, and we have to win.”
It was highly unlikely that the old man was a poker player in his lifetime.
But he knew that in the game, even the worst hand could be a winner—if you knew how to play it right.
John also taught himself one self-serving lesson; If you wanted things done correctly, do it yourself.
Hence, winning became a habit for him. He went into transporting tires by a wooden boat from Cebu to Lucena in Quezon, then to Manila by truck.
When the war ended in 1946, John who was 20 then and his brother Henry formed Amasia Trading which imported onions, flour, used clothes, old newspapers, magazines and fruits from the United States.
There was no turning back thence. In 1957, John started manufacturing corn starch on a P500,000-loan from the bank.
“Upon launching our first product, Panda corn starch, a price war ensued. After the smoke cleared, Universal Corn Products was left standing. It is the foundation upon which JG Summit Holdings now stands,” he said.
John admitted that building a business empire as big as JG Summit was fraught will difficulties, with challenges thrown at his way at every turn. He could have taken the easy path by keeping his business small yet safe, but it was not an option. “Instead I chose to fight, but this did not mean I won each time,” he said.
John died on Nov. 9, 2019 at the age of 93 and left behind a thriving conglomerate with a fleet of flagships to its name: Cebu Pacific, Universal Robina Corp., Robinsons Land Corp. and JG Summit Olefins Corp., to name a few.