From HK department store heir to outback cattleman: Inside Bruce Cheung’s US$130m wagyu gamble

One day in 2014, Singaporean businessman Bruce Cheung sat in the office of Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett for a ten-minute meeting, arranged through intermediaries. He was there to persuade the premier to agree to one thing.

He spoke about his ambitious plans to invest in cattle stations — an undertaking potentially worth hundreds of millions of Australian dollars that would bring significant economic benefits to the region.

The premier asked, “How much money do you need?”

Cheung replied, “No, all I need is your permission to use the groundwater. Before it goes into the ocean, I can capture it and use it to grow crops.”

What was supposed to be a ten-minute meeting lasted an hour and 45 minutes. Two months later, the premier approved what would become one of Western Australia’s most significant agricultural projects. Soon after, Cheung’s agriculture company, Pardoo Wagyu, was launched.

Twelve years later, his company has invested A$180 million (approximately US$128 million), owns and operates seven cattle and farming properties covering more than 800,000 hectares, and manages a herd of over 40,000 cattle. Its products are exported to 15 markets around the world.

In March, Cheung returned to Singapore with Pardoo Wagyu beef, distinguished by its fine, spiderweb-like marbling. Through selected distributors, the beef will be served in Michelin-starred steakhouses, five-star hotels and other high-end restaurants across Singapore.

Recalling the life-changing meeting, he told me how he had spoken about his grand vision with conviction and won the premier’s support. Remarkably, this seasoned businessman had not worked out the costs of the investment or its expected returns when he committed.

An old man’s romantic ideas of business

“If I calculated, I would not do it; it wouldn’t happen,” he said. He summed it all up as “an old man’s romance”.

He recalls: “I just thought at the time that this is something I must do now. Something at the back of my mind is pushing me and saying: If you don’t do this, it’s almost like you lost your first girlfriend or your first boyfriend.”

At the time, Cheung was approaching 60, and he persuaded the premier: “I’m an old man. If you keep it too long, I may die along the way. So let me finish this.”

That year, Cheung stepped away from the day-to-day management of China International Duty Free Group, the company he had co-founded, ending a more than 20-year career in the duty-free industry. He said it was because he “was getting bored” and felt he was standing in the way of younger people seeking opportunities to advance.

He saw two paths before him: he could spend his days making phone calls, arranging golf games and having dim sum, or he could do something completely different to challenge himself to the limit.

Sixty is not the end point of life

He chose the latter, because “60 is not the end point of our life”.

Around that time, following the financial crisis and volatile food prices, food security became a key priority in Singapore. In 2012, the government established an inter-ministry food security committee to explore ways to reduce food wastage and enhance food resilience.

This gave Cheung some inspiration, prompting him to turn his attention to agriculture. Among the many sectors, he focused on the beef market. At the time, Wagyu beef was just gaining global recognition but the market was not yet saturated, and he decided to raise Wagyu. In terms of location, Australia was the most suitable choice, given its vast land size and proximity.

It was a huge leap. With him approaching retirement age, why leave a familiar environment and comfortable life to plunge into the remote world of agriculture and pastoral farming? Friends said it would be more than enough for him to just buy a piece of farmland and rent it to others to manage, and go there occasionally on holiday.

He shook his head. Recalling the night he made the decision, he said that after having a bottle of red wine, he told himself: “I’ll go.”

That marked the start of a long, solitary journey. He drove an SUV north from Sydney, searching for his own cattle station across New South Wales and Queensland. He looked at more than 20 farms, but came away without clarity. He said he was just a “romantic naive guy”: “I had a general idea, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for.”

He drove all the way to Cairns without any success, and then turned west, continuing on to Darwin.

An incidental field inspection made him realise that the only way to make the project profitable was through irrigation, and increasing the carrying capacity of the pasture.

Water was the key. By this point, he had already been on the journey for nearly two months.

He continued westwards. One day, on the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, the exhausted Cheung gazed blankly out to sea. In the vast expanse of the ocean, a black swan swimming caught his eye. He watched it for half an hour; the scene did not make sense. Black swans usually live by fresh water, so how could one appear by the ocean?

“So I was thinking, is that a premonition? I thought about my touch with the world, with this bird. I shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be there. And yet we are all sitting here,” he recounts.

By then, he was close to the 90-day deadline he had agreed with his wife. Before setting off on the journey, he had told her he would be home in 90 days. Yet the image of that seemingly otherworldly black swan would not leave his mind. He described its impact as being like falling into a wangnian lian (忘年恋, a May-December romance).

He started researching the area and found that it was called Wallal, which means “sweet water” in the local Indigenous language. The water close to the shore was in fact fresh, which was why the swans were there. In earlier times, it was said that sailors would stop there and simply lower buckets to draw drinking water.

On further investigation, he discovered that the area lay within the West Canning Basin, where the rock strata held abundant groundwater, forming a vast natural freshwater reservoir. This was just the water source he needed.

What he had to do next was to persuade the government of Western Australia to grant him permission to use these water resources, which led to the aforementioned meeting with the premier. Once approval was secured, he would be able to channel the groundwater into the pasture through an innovative irrigation system.

‘Courting death’ to build a brand

Cheung then purchased Pardoo Station, a 150-year-old pastoral property situated above the basin, but sold off all the cattle there. He said he engaged experts and a consumer panel to conduct blind tastings of all the breeds from the area, and none scored higher than six points.

At the time, there was no Wagyu in Western Australia. Cheung studied genetic introduction and crossbreeding techniques, but despite repeated attempts, the meat quality was still not good enough.

After a long search, he eventually tracked down Shogo Takeda, a veteran Japanese Wagyu breeding expert and one of the pioneers who brought Japanese Wagyu genetics overseas.

Cheung clearly remembers that on the morning of 10 February 2016, at 11 am, in temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius, he visited Takeda at his home in Hokkaido. After a conversation lasting more than five hours, Takeda ended the meeting, giving no clear answer as to whether he would be willing to help.

Some time later, Cheung unexpectedly received a phone call from another cattle breeder in Australia, who, at Takeda’s request, shared with him valuable genetic material from the Wagyu gene pool, along with advice on husbandry.

Looking back on that chilly afternoon, Cheung said he had met many benefactors in his life, and Takeda was one of them — he had essentially provided free assistance. Years later, he learned that Takeda did not give him an answer on that day because he did not want to encourage him to “jump into the sea”.

Cheung jokes that many of his business decisions seem like “courting death”. Something seems to go wrong almost every month — from fires to droughts, floods, cyclones, locust infestations, disease and staff strikes.

The closest he has come to death was one day in late April 2023, when Australia was struck by its largest-ever typhoon, destroying 95% of his rearing facilities and wiping out all the staff dormitories. Speaking of how he felt that day, he relates to former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s position during the Wenchuan earthquake: “He went to Sichuan. He must have been very sad — but he couldn’t be too sad.”

What followed was a difficult period of transition and rebuilding. He repeatedly describes himself as “stupid”, saying: “If you’re not stubborn enough, you can’t get anything done.”

For more than a decade, he devoted himself to improving his product, from breeding for genetics, managing mating, improving feeding conditions and experimenting with different grasses to enhance the flavour of the beef. In recent years, he has also begun to build his own brand.

“Production of Japanese A5 beef already accounts for more than 50% of all beef. In my opinion it’s overproduced. The Western markets don’t really want A5 beef. The Japanese might take two bites and be done, but that’s nowhere near enough for Western consumers. For me, that’s the space the Japanese have left for us.”

Rather than competing head-on with Japanese A5 wagyu, he wants to create a wagyu with medium richness and stable quality, and there is also a need to turn it into a brand.

Pardoo Wagyu currently has more than 40,000 cattle. Output has not yet reached saturation; Cheung’s goal is to raise 65,000 to 70,000 cattle.

Secret to youthfulness: managing stress

Now 72, Cheung sports a head of short black hair and speaks with a mix of humility, humour and force. Asked for his secret to staying young, he laughs and quips, “SK-II”, referring to the skincare brand, before commenting seriously: “You have to manage stress. Don’t let it occupy every second of your life. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed.”

He adds: “In agriculture there are always sudden changes, and they’re usually negative.” Having lived this long, his philosophy in life is to embrace uncertainty and not fear it.

Comparing his two entrepreneurial journeys, he says the first rode the wave of economic take-off which made it more profitable and much easier. His second attempt was much tougher, both financially and operationally. “It’s completely different from what I first imagined. But that’s life, and that’s true of all start-ups — it’s a painful process.”

Yet this does not stop him from feeling grateful for the opportunity. He muses that few people get the chance to make changes that shape their lives positively. Most people at retirement age would not have the courage to dream, and he considers himself incredibly lucky to have had that opportunity.

But this requires giving one’s all, enduring loneliness, deep introspection when faced with problems and overcoming difficulties.

Asked whether he considers Pardoo Wagyu a success, Cheung says it is still in a “stable growth stage”.

He has longer-term plans and ambitions for the company: to leverage its genetic stock, technology and market advantages to “migrate” production, so that in future it can be replicated in many parts of the world.

From Hong Kong to the US to Singapore

Born in Hong Kong in 1954, Cheung’s story is very much one for the ages.

His grandfather, Cheung Chuk-shan, was a rattan craftsman in Guangdong with six children. During WWII, he sent four of his sons to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur respectively to fend for themselves. Cheung’s father, the eldest son Cheung Yuk-kai, was sent to Hong Kong.

His father later had the opportunity to invest in a department store in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, which he ran for 38 years. Cheung grew up in Hong Kong, then went to boarding school in the US where he completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees, majoring in finance.

He describes himself as coming from a big family. His father alone had 13 children, and there were a total of 28 children in the close-knit family. “Everyone was assigned a task. You study medicine, you study technology, you study finance. Whether you liked it or not, that was your goal.”

Of course, no one was sent to study agriculture.

In 1989, Cheung returned to Asia from the US. In early 1990, he came to Singapore, where he had relatives, which made it quite a familiar place. He soon launched his own duty-free business, and seized on China’s economic take-off by co-founding China International Duty Free Group, rapidly expanding to more than 100 points of sale throughout airports, cruise ships and airlines.

In 1998, after many years of working and living in Singapore, he chose to become a Singapore citizen.

Born in Hong Kong, educated in the US, and an entrepreneur in Singapore and then Australia: Cheung spent the first decade of Pardoo Wagyu shuttling between ranches in Western Australia. Now, in order to build it into an international brand, he flies frequently around the globe.

He observes that both Hong Kong and Singapore are immigrant societies, and he sees himself as “a citizen of the world”. At the same time, he has a strong connection to his own culture and roots.

Cheung places great emphasis on ecological sustainability. Beyond measures to cut carbon emissions from his ranches, he also values relations with the Indigenous communities nearby. Interestingly, in this far-flung corner of Western Australia, there is a group of indigenous people with Cantonese ancestry, the descendants of migrants from Guangdong who arrived during the gold rush more than a century ago.

“They live very close to where my grandparents were from. I’ve even invited some of the elders back to trace their roots.”

Savouring rural life

When it comes to hobbies, Cheung says he used to enjoy golf, joking that his driving distance is “getting worse and worse”. These days, he prefers sports that do not require much brain activity. The avid cyclist owns bicycles in Singapore, Hong Kong, Perth, Osaka and Toronto. He also enjoys swimming and diving, relishing the feeling of being free from gravity and focusing only on his breathing.

He speaks enthusiastically about fishing by the streams near his Western Australia ranch, where the water is a shimmering blue. At dawn, sharks and sea turtles swim past, and the fish are huge. “It’s a truly beautiful, magical place.”

Despite growing up in the city, Cheung much prefers the peace of rural life.

Allowing sons to choose their own path

His two sons are different; at most, they would drop by the farm on the weekends. He jokes: “How many city boys do you know who would actually like to live on a farm?”

Another of Cheung’s hobbies is skiing with his sons. His younger son is an avid skier, spending about a month each year on the slopes, so Cheung also spends a fair amount of time at ski resorts.

His elder son is a dentist, while his younger son is a musician. Cheung would not impose his own preferences on them, nor map out their life as the previous generation did. Neither does he expect them to take over his business.

As for himself, retirement is not on the cards. After more than a decade in agriculture, he has never once felt bored. “I can’t guarantee I won’t change my mind in future; but by then I might not even remember my own name!”

Cheung said there is still much he wants to do. Beyond building the brand, he is now focused mainly on genetics, researching how to improve meat quality and the herd’s resilience, meaning the cattle’s overall ability to stay healthy and fertile in the face of extreme weather or disease.

After 72 years of life, what is his ultimate goal? He answers: “I want to be that ‘silly old guy’ everyone laughs at. And after they’ve laughed, they’ll say to themselves, ‘If even he can do it, why can’t I?’”

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “Pardoo Wagyu创办人张镜堂——59岁赴澳养和牛重启人生 牧场面积超十个新加坡”.

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