Posted Monday, February 16, 2004; 21:00 HKT
Dhanin Chearavanont isn't ashamed to say he's a man who wants to retire. Still putting in 14-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks at age 65, the chairman and CEO of Charoen Pokphand Group (CP)—Thailand's one truly multinational corporation—says he's found time to meditate on the pleasant possibilities of voluntary idleness (he's worth about $1.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine). Maybe he would unmoor his yacht Fortune Dragon and sail off into the South China Sea. Or maybe he'd head down to his farm and tend to his prized fighting cocks. Maybe. It's just that things keep cropping up at work, he explains.

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Things like Asia's 1997 economic meltdown. Dhanin says that just before the Thai baht collapsed, which set off a regional crisis, he almost retired. But how could he walk away when his company was in peril? Times were so tough that Dhanin, who had spent decades building a firm that employs 100,000 people in 20 countries, found himself ignominiously confronted by a bevy of bankers in the London offices of HSBC. The bank was calling in about $400 million in loans made to CP, and the company didn't have the cash to pay. Dhanin was forced to unload assets to raise money, including stakes in a Chinese motorcycle manufacturer and a brewer—companies he believed would thrive as the mainland market developed. "I was prepared to use any means to ensure our survival," says Dhanin. "It felt bad, but I always believed we'd get it back tomorrow."

He did. Five years later, he has restructured CP, reduced its debt and re-established its foothold in China. CP has set up a new brewery and a motorcycle factory and has announced plans to open 100 hypermarkets on the mainland by 2006. "If we don't go in now, we will ultimately be sidelined," says Dhanin. Chinese competitors, in particular, "are springing up like mushrooms after a rain."

However, just as Dhanin is building anew, he has been confronted with another potentially damaging setback: avian flu, which has devastated the Thai poultry industry over the past several months. As the No. 1 chicken producer in Asia, CP has also been swept up in the crisis. Initially, rumors swirled that CP helped spread the disease in Thailand by trying to cover up the outbreak, which the Thai government at first identified as cholera. CP's participation in any cover-up "is just not true," says a tired and exasperated Dhanin. The company's modern chicken farms are a bulwark against the spread of diseases, he contends, because its birds are kept in giant warehouses, sequestered from wild birds believed to be carriers of the flu virus. His views are supported by Dr. Hans Wagner, a Bangkok-based senior regional officer of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, who said enclosed factory farms like CP's are the safest way to go.

Moreover, Dhanin says CP began warning Thai farmers about the possible presence of avian flu in November. That's when company officials showed him a newspaper photograph of birds dying in central Thailand. Dhanin says he had no idea it was the deadly h5n1 virus, but he knew he had to act. Orders went out to seal up all of CP's chicken plants by further restricting access to plant premises—even delivery trucks were kept out. He also persuaded Thai farmers who produce poultry for CP under contract to cull their flocks. More than two months later, his suspicion that the country had an epidemic on its hands was confirmed. On Jan. 23, government officials announced that two young boys had tested positive for avian flu. The next day, CP's stock plummeted by 12.5%. Share prices have since rebounded. CP says no birds on the factory farms it operates have got sick. Investors expect CP can weather the damage done to its chicken operations, which account for just 10% of the group's revenues.

Company officials haven't said how much the bird-flu outbreak might cost CP. What's clear is that Dhanin will have to battle back again. He says he's ready. After all, he comes from a family that started with next to nothing. Dhanin's father and uncle emigrated from Shantou in China's Guangdong province in 1921, settled in Bangkok and scraped together enough money to open a seed shop. That sprouted operations in animal feed and fertilizer. When Dhanin, the youngest of four sons, took over the company in 1964, he moved aggressively into poultry farming. A tie-up with Arbor Acres Farm of the U.S. added new technology and the concept of vertical integration—from feed to fowl to distribution, retail and fast-food outlets. And when Deng Xiaoping began the first tentative capitalist reforms in China in 1978, CP was the first in the door—attaining the company registration number 001 for the mainland.

If it weren't for the challenge of retaking China, Dhanin insists that he might have retired after the 1997 economic crisis. But, ever the strategic thinker, he's preparing for the day when age or illness reduces his role. His sons—Soopakij, Narong and Supachai—were all educated at top Western business schools and hold jobs at some of CP's most demanding ventures. "You should place your children at the feet of masters, rather than make them bosses right away," Dhanin says. And though the sons work as hard as their father, they're open to other outlooks on business and on life. "My father may not like to hear this," says the youngest, Supachai, 36-year-old CEO of CP subsidiary TelecomAsia, "but some day, I'd like to retire early." Dream on, kiddo.

—By Robert Horn