(1888PressRelease)
July 17, 2007 - Many have heard their names called since May, when airline chair Rev. Raymond Lee, 55, began scattering biz-class tickets like manna among the city's influential. After all, Oasis has 81 such seats, at $1,399 per, on the 747-400 aircraft it has scheduled for six-days-a-week Vancouver-Hong Kong service. There are 278 more in economy class, with tickets from $299.
The airline began daily Hong Kong-London service in 2006.
"For us to introduce a jumbo jet to Vancouver increases [existing] capacity by 40 per cent," Lee said. A Faith Community Church pastor and graduate of Hong Kong's elite Diocesan Boys School and Harvard University, he claimed Oasis will not need to raid other carriers.
That might occur only if transpacific boardings were to remain static. Lee calls that a red ocean strategy, based on analysts and traditional observers seeing no more than 500,000 passengers annually. "But we believe our blue ocean strategy has identified an untapped market we estimate at 1.5 million in five years," he said, meaning those specifically attracted by lower fares as well as the 380,000 ethnic Chinese living in Greater Vancouver and the 250,000 Canadians in Hong Kong.
"The sky's the limit," said wife and Oasis executive director Priscilla Hwang Lee. She's also a New England Conservatory of Music-trained pianist, whose recitals of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich concertos doubtless accustomed her to thinking big.
The two reportedly own some 60 per cent of Oasis, which has postponed an initial public offering of HK$10 billion ($1.35 billion Cdn) until 2009 or 2020, when it proposes to operate 15 or more aircraft.
As on the London route, economy passengers get reasonable leg room, TV-seatback entertainment and hot meals. But there's no pie in the sky about the Lees' blue-ocean policy for serving non-traditional customers. They've applied it since 1995 to their Oasis Development Enterprises, which is based in Massachusetts' former Boston Stock Exchange building and owns a portfolio of 30 U.S. properties that includes the Wells Fargo & Co's Las Vegas regional headquarters and is rumoured to be worth close to $1 billion.
For that business, the policy is called the 50, 75 and 25 per-cent rule, said Raymond Lee. "At 50 per-cent occupancy, we plan to break even. At 75 per-cent occupancy, we look to making a 25-per-cent return. So, with the remaining 25 per cent, we have the opportunity to do some good."
That means providing low- or no-cost office space for Habitat for Humanity and other non-profit organizations. It also means an average occupancy of 96 per cent, Lee said.
The firm reports 90 per-cent occupancy for its extensive holdings in once-decaying Lynn, a Massachusetts industrial community, once known as Sin City, that began calling itself City of Firsts a decade ago. ODE's policy, Lee said, is "to catalyse prosperity in regions of despair through strategies of public participation and local empowerment,"
As for getting the less financially empowered aboard his aircraft, Lee said: "I really take pleasure in offering superior service. I find that a spiritual undertaking. If I were in church, people might say, Amen."
OPUS DEUX: Trilogy Properties Corp. president-CEO John Evans will front the fifth annual Yaletown street party outside his group's 96-room Opus Hotel July 27. But his mind may be far away from Davie and Mainland Street. Since November 2006, it's often been at Sherbrooke and St. Laurent in Montreal, where efforts to acquire the 136-room Hotel Godin ended with a deal -- likely in the mid-$30-million range -- Monday.
The vendors were the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, which handles some $200 billion in pension funds and other depositor assets, and Hotels Incognita. But the Godin, which never offered full service after its completion on a former Greek Orthodox church site in 2004, won't be incognito. It'll be renamed Opus.
It will also be liquor-licensed -- finally -- for 1,000 seats, the first 350 of which should begin serving cocktails and tapas dishes in August. By March 2008, a 4,000-square-foot licensed terrace and 5,000 square feet of designated food and beverage space will be added at a cost of more than $3 million, Evans said.
Trilogy would not have built a new facility in Montreal, even one so close to the Old Montreal district, said Evans. But the Godin presented "a brilliant opportunity" to extend the Opus brand.
HOLD THE PHONE: If VTech Telecommunications Canada Ltd. president Gordon Chow's profile were any lower, he wouldn't be able to see over his two-seater Maserati's dashboard. But the former Porsche owner likes it that way, even though he elevated himself for a rare public appearance in the receiving line at Oasis Hongkong Airlines' launch party.
Chow was there because the 100-employee, Richmond-based private company he has headed since its 1986 inception is the Canadian arm of Hong Kong-based, Bermuda-registered VTech Holdings Ltd. That firm's founder, chair and CEO, Allan Wong, is an investor in, and vice-chairman of, Oasis. As the airline's plans were being formulated in Hong Kong, Wong basically said of Chow: "He's over there [Canada]. Let him help."
Chow had to offer that aid quickly after receiving the file in February and seeing Oasis start flying this month -- a scant 60 days after receiving approval.
His duties entailed housing airline operations and two Discover The World Marketing staffers in VTech's office, launching a $500,000 advertising campaign, overseeing outsourced operations, and readying packages to pitch Whistler to Kong Kong residents and China's entire Pearl River Delta region to Canadians.
Chow likely relished the change of pace. A University of B.C. commerce graduate who worked at Deloitte & Touche "just long enough to get my C.A.," he entered the entrepreneurial crucible as the Narod development firm's finance manager in 1983, "when the market was going crazy and we were paying prime-plus-one, prime-plus-two for money -- and that meant 20 per cent. When interest rates finally came down, we ran out of cash."
Narod went into receivership, and Chow went into immigration work. That's how he met Wong and VTech co-founder Stephen Yeung, who invited him to launch Canadian operations for a firm that made electronic educational toys and training aids before adding cordless telephone systems. As for the Canadian firm's performance today, he'll say only that it parallels the parent corporation's.
Not a bad parallel. The 20,000-employee group's revenues increased by 21.5 per cent to US $1.46 billion in 2007, according to results announced June 20.
Shareholder-attributable profitability set a record, too, by growing 42 per cent to US $182.9 million, and dividends rose 150 per cent to 41 cents per share. Business Week magazine rated VTech 56th among global IT companies, and 10th in profitability.
A father of three girls, Chow is a Crofton House board member who sits on the executive of that private school's current $20-million capital campaign. That bag may be easier to fill than a 359-seat jumbo jet to and from Hong Kong six times weekly.
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