Skip to main content
Back
Popular Pages
Educators
Businesses
Learners
About
Influential Leaders

Ricky Wong Wai-kay

Co-Founder, Vice Chairman, and Group CEO, Hong Kong Technology Venture Company Limited
Recognition Year(s): 2025
Area of Impact: Entrepreneurship
School: CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Location: Hong Kong

Summary

Ricky Wong Wai-kay, vice chairman and group CEO of Hong Kong Technology Venture Company Limited (HKTV Group), has popularized advanced technology and applications in the telecom industry, and his leadership has earned him awards recognizing his far-reaching influence. Nicknamed ”Magic Boy,” Wong has continued to challenge market regulatory restraints in Hong Kong with his various entrepreneurial ventures, such as City Telecom (H.K.) Limited, Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN), and HKTVmall—the largest 24/7 online shopping mall in Hong Kong, which has rewritten the retail and e-commerce ecosystem and e-shopping tradition in Hong Kong.

Entrepreneurial Impact

Before becoming a telecoms industry giant, Wong earned a Bachelor of Science in Electronics and a Master of Business Administration degree under the Executive MBA program from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

In 1992, Wong co-founded City Telecom (H.K.) Limited, the first provider of alternative international direct dialing service with callback technology in Hong Kong. In 1999, he launched HKBN, which is now the fastest-growing and second-largest broadband service provider in Hong Kong. HKBN provides 100-Mbps to 1-Gbps broadband, telephone, and internet protocol TV services on its fiber network.

In 2010, Global Telecoms Business magazine voted Wong among the top 100 most influential people in the industry worldwide. Wong is also the 2010 winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year™ China awards in the Telecom category. HKTV Group had expanded and led the market in the highly competitive Hong Kong telecom industry, previously dominated by heavyweights.

From 2015 onward, Wong led the development of e-commerce business. HKTV Group built the largest 24-hour online shopping mall and a unique digital ecosystem in Hong Kong. HKTVmall is an e-commerce platform that operates much like Amazon. Despite the fact that Wong was told this venture would fail because there was no demand for online shopping in Hong Kong, it was a massive success.

Business for HKTVmall had been growing steadily from a low base before COVID-19. Sales turnover tripled in the three years leading to 2019 to 1.4 billion HKD (approximately 180 million USD). Following a boost during the pandemic, when consumers turned to online services at exponential rates, sales doubled in 2020 to 2.88 billion HKD (about 3.7 million USD).

Now, HKTVmall is Hong Kong’s largest online shopping mall. It partners with approximately 6,800 merchants and suppliers and provides more than 1.9 million product and service options for people to browse anytime, anywhere. The one-stop service includes online shopping, marketing and digital advertising, big data analysis, smart logistics and fulfillment, physical online-to-offline stores, and customer services.

Wong aspires to build similar online shopping malls for would-be owners everywhere, offering them the chance to become virtual real estate developers. The company has developed the tech know-how in-house with a team of over 200 programmers based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which has helped drive down HKTVmall’s fulfillment cost—the expense of completing a purchase order, including the cost of labor—to 11.8 percent of total general merchandise value on completed orders, down from 22 percent in 2017. At that time, Wong had first started using robotics and automation technology.

Further expanding its foothold as a technology innovator, HKTV Group has leveraged its unique knowledge, experiences, technical skills, and solutions to serve local retailers of different scales. With HKTV Group’s support, these recipients have been able to enter into digital retailing rapidly, bringing them tremendous technology innovation and economic value.

HKTV has parlayed the expertise it has accrued in Hong Kong into an intriguing new experiment in Manchester, U.K.—the Fully Automated Retail Store and System. The unstaffed grocery store features robotic arms that gather customers’ orders and place their purchases in a smart locker for pickup, and the store is closed to anyone except employees who restock it.

Wong continues to play a role in entrepreneurial education as a current member of the Board of Trustees for United College, CUHK.

Additional Information