Special Report – Lao Chi Long

What better way to celebrate Macau Business’s 17th anniversary than to showcase 17 locals aged 35 and younger with the kind of talent that boosts our confidence in the future?

MB May 2021 Special Report | 17 talented young people


He founded his first company at the age of 25 and hasn’t stopped since. Yet he wants to be known not just as a businessman, but as an entrepreneur, something he’s been doing for the past eight years.

Lao Chi Long was born into an entrepreneurial family in Macau, and he’d be the first to admit that was a big influence on his childhood dream of becoming a businessman like his parents.

To make that dream a reality, when Lao was 15 years old, he left Macau for the United States, where he continued his studies and graduated in Marketing from Portland State University in Oregon. His major interest, though, was and still is the Chinese market.

For that reason, he did an internship at a factory in Jiangmen, “to learn what the Chinese market is like. That decision helped me build up experience and hone my interest, determination and confidence for starting up my own business later on.”

It didn’t take him long to meet the goal of creating his first business: when he was 25, Lao opened his first company, Era Nova Ltd in the bakery industry, with two childhood best friends in 2013.

He hasn’t stopped since. Now 33, he has a number of businesses in a variety of sectors ranging from food and beverage (105 Coffee) to renovation and design (HanYi, started in 2019, his most recent).

In addition, he’s created a brand of skin care products (Hanmay), a “Belt and Road Global Investment Fund” and a trading company between Macau and Korea (Makos).

The company that has given him the most visibility, however, has been Pineapple Chain Co. Ltd, an innovative Macau company using blockchain technology to create a brand-new reward points platform. His first product (Points Red) is the first local Point Redemption Platform to use blockchain technology, which has earned it a high degree of confidence from the banking sector.

“As a survivor of the Startups war, I don’t want to just focus on business; I also want to fulfil social responsibilities,” he says. For that reason, he’s joined a number of associations in both mainland China and Macau and taken on various roles, including membership in the Shantou CPPCC, the Standing Committee of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese Youth Committee, the Guangdong Youth Federation, and the post of Vice Chairman for the Macau Association of Returned Overseas Chinese.

“I remember a quote from a successful entrepreneur: ‘If you are good in business, then you’re just a businessman; but if you are not only good in business, but also fulfil social responsibilities, then you can have the title of entrepreneur.’”

“So be an entrepreneur,” he tells himself for inspiration, “not just a businessman.”

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