By John Lui

Lasting less than a day in boarding school had not been the teenage Chou Cheng Ngok's plan.

In 1954, the lad, then 17, travelled by boat from Singapore to England. He was put into a London boarding house for Asian students in transit to permanent schools. 'Maybe it was my sixth sense,' he says of the urge to see the school before starting school term there.

The boy, who would later head diversified company Popular Holdings, hopped on the train to the school in Kent and upon arriving, had a chat with the principal. He was told that school life would include such hearty character-building rituals as 6.30am risings, cold showers and steeplechases.

'You run in mud and cross streams and woods and climb mountains,' says Mr Chou, recalling what he was told about steeplechases. More than half a century later, he still sounds astounded at the sport's demands.

'I politely said goodbye and never went back. That was the beginning and end of my boarding-school life,' says the 72-year-old, chuckling.

Contrarian turns and a certain amount of cheek figure large in the life of Mr Chou, the chairman and managing director of publicly listed Popular, a group whose activities today include book retailing and distribution, publishing, e-learning and property development.

He is days away from the official opening of prologue, the company's newest bookstore, located in Ion Orchard.

The two-storey outlet, sprawled over 16,000 sq ft, includes a cafe. Its upscale identity will be quite different from the family-oriented, fluorescent-lit heartlander look and feel that Popular bookstores have come to embody, he says.

'We don't want people to look at prologue as another shop based on the Popular template,' he says.

Speaking to Life! at his bungalow in Bukit Timah, the man who moved the company from book wholesale and distribution into book retailing, from Chinese- only to bilingual, and is now adding property development to the mix, is himself a living example of cultural evolution.

He speaks in a relaxed, jocular manner and is not shy about telling it like it is, especially when talking about how cash problems forced the firm to ditch its wholesale business for retail in the 1980s.

His father, Mr Chou Sing Chu, was a businessman from Zhejiang, China, who founded the Cheng Hing Company in South Bridge Road in 1924, selling Chinese novels and decorative posters.

The business grew to include Chinese book distribution, publishing and, in 1936, one retail outlet, The Popular Book Company, in North Bridge Road.

When he was in his 40s and armed with only three years of formal Chinese education, the elder Mr Chou taught himself English from 78 rpm records.

'He could feel the winds of change,' says the son. The patriarch, who sent his two older sons to Chinese primary and secondary schools, had third son Cheng Ngok attend Anglo-Chinese School and his two daughters, Pau Chee and Cheng Yim, attend convent schools.

The soon-to-open prologue caps a list of innovations driven by the founder's youngest son.

After graduating with a master's degree in political science from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, the young man was sent to Hong Kong in 1964 to oversee the general and textbook publishing business there. Brother Cheng Chuen, older than Mr Chou by four years, ran the book business in Singapore and Malaysia.

The 1960s and 1970s were especially cash-strapped times for the company, says Mr Chou. It was held hostage by its customers, the dozens of small book retailers across Malaysia and Singapore.

Delaying payment for as long as possible was a common practice. Collectively, they owed millions of dollars, but collecting debts from each individual was not worth the effort, says Mr Chou.

'We had to make a decision. Do we continue with the business model where for every hundred dollars' worth of goods we sold, we could expect to get only $50 back?'

His proposal was short and sharp. Write off the wholesale business and throw away unsold stock - about 50 lorry-loads' worth - so as to sell the warehouse. The money could then help fund a chain of the company's own book retail stores.

The idiosyncratic, conservative way in which the small bookshops were run convinced him that there was an unmet consumer need for air-conditioned bookshops with a large selection, staffed by professionals and run under centralised, modern management.

And rather than stock only Chinese books, they could also carry English titles - the bilingual concept, as it would come to be known.

Cheng Chuen, then head of the company, baulked at the radical change proposed by his younger sibling. Many of the shopkeepers were old friends and without a supply of books, they would be in trouble.

But Mr Chou managed to convince his brother to quit the wholesale business and agree to a turf separation. Cheng Chuen, who died of cancer in 1996, would run the publishing and stationery business in Malaysia under the World Book Company name, while Mr Chou would grow the bilingual bookstore business in Singapore and Malaysia under the Popular Book Company.

Mr Kenny Chan, 57, a former executive of Mr Chou's who today is store and merchandising director with rival Books Kinokuniya, remembers the disbelief and doubt that greeted him and Mr Chou when they announced plans to open an air-conditioned, multi- storey store in Kuala Lumpur in 1984.

'None of the Malaysian-Chinese booksellers believed that he would succeed,' he says. Nothing of that scale had been tried before and they could not see how a store that large could attract enough customers to cover costs.

But the concept worked and the crowds came. 'Mr Chou had faith in the book-reading public and in their hunger for a good bookstore,' says Mr Chan.

The Popular Book Company chain today has 133 stores in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, including four English- only bookshops under the Harris banner.

Parent company Popular Holdings also owns a strong publishing and e-learning arm. In March, it recorded a quarterly revenue of more than $100 million.

But the shift to an English-based education system has decimated the Chinese bookshop business. The inclusion of Chinese titles by Japanese megastore Books Kinokuniya in Orchard Road worsened its plight.

The arrival of US retailer Borders Books in 1997 and Books Kinokuniya's opening of a mega-store in 1999 intensified the competition at the higher end.

Even Popular Book Company, which many felt was safe in its heartland niche, had to change. In 2005, it revamped its flagship 32,000 sq ft store in Bras Basah Complex to stay current. It had that most current of bookstore additions, a cafe.

And so it is with prologue today. With some reluctance, Mr Chou calls it a 'lifestyle' store. That word, so abused by marketers, does not roll off his tongue smoothly. He seems happier talking in more quantifiable, concrete ideas.

'Lifestyle is more than just having a coffee area or this or that,' he says, after mulling over how to express the uniqueness of the venture.

He is reluctant to reveal more but seems sincere in wanting the effort put into prologue's careful market positioning be appreciated. It will be a bilingual store for both locals and tourists that will not be a poor cousin of the major international brands in the same building, he promises.

The changes are necessary, he says, as book trade in Singapore and elsewhere in the world has dipped.

'The irony is that as people become more affluent, the importance of books has fallen.

'The challenge is, how do you bring them back?' he says.

Striking off in new directions seems to come naturally to Mr Chou, but one of his moves, in particular, had business journalists tut-tutting. In 2006, his company bought 15,070 sq ft of land in Robin Road for $12.5 million, with plans to build a condominium. Stay in the book business, they cautioned.

The 14-unit One Robin went on the market recently. 'We sold everything in less than two months and we made a profit. I feel vindicated,' says Mr Chou.

It is wrong to see him as yet another dabbler moving too far out of his main business, he says. 'I am in it for the long term. I'm building it as another core business.'

He adds that he disagrees with pundits who say companies cannot have more than one core business. 'Can they accept the word 'diversify' instead?' he says cheekily. Another housing venture, 18 Shelford in Shelford Road, will be launched next year.

While Mr Chou may take the optimist's view of the group's property ventures thus far, no analyst has as yet come out in favour of it. But as owner of 57 per cent of Popular Holdings, he has a strong hand in shaping the group's strategy.

The company's move into e-learning has also been a magnet for criticism for failing to be as lucrative as expected.

But Mr Chou remains unbowed. He has helped push forward changes from his base in Hong Kong, where he has lived for 45 years. From there, he spends roughly half the year on the road, visiting corporate offices in Asia, Britain and Canada.

'A lot of people say it's a punishing schedule, but I don't think so,' he says. He has the gift of being able to sleep anywhere, any time.

And he never gets jet-lagged, he says. For example, he would board a flight to London at midnight, get a full night's rest and is ready for work when he touches down in the city at dawn, he says.

He travels so much because he prefers to go to meetings in person rather than rely on e-mails or telephone calls.

'You will be surprised at how much you can see by being there, rather than reading the reports,' he says.

So keen is he to eyeball things in person that in 1990, he personally scoped out the proposed site for Penang's Popular Book Company outlet for a week. He visited the location, Komtar Tower, morning, noon and night, both on weekdays and weekends, to see the whole-day pattern of pedestrian traffic, before deciding it was the right spot.

He calls the quality of being there 'physical connectivity'. It is the feeling he gets when he comes to understand a place for himself.

He says he does not have a hobby or sport. When he is not immersed in work, he would rather watch television or go out for dinner.

The serious foodie admits to having a fondness for chocolate and has to set limits on his intake. Cantonese delicacies such as whole-fried rice sparrows used to be among his favourites, though the bird flu has put an end to that dish for him.

His new favourite is yellow oil crab, a rare seasonal delicacy that is created when hot weather causes the liver fat in Hong Kong crabs to melt and seep into the meat. ?'It's fantastic,' he says.

Talk to him about retirement and succession, and he says he has 'given up' thinking of retirement, given how attached he is to the business.

With his wife Hu Nan Lee, whose age is described as 'top secret', he has two children, Lynn, a housewife, and Wayne, the head of greater China operations for a United States-listed Internet company. He is based in Shanghai.

Both are settled in their own lives but Mr Chou will not rule out either of them taking a more active role in Popular should the need arise.

But he stresses that the organisation runs on merit, not family ties.

'We are a publicly listed company with 3,000 staff and I don't have a single relative working here,' he says.

He adds that he will soldier on as head for as long as he can. 'A certain sentiment' keeps him in the job, he says. His longevity in the company makes him chuckle, considering he once harboured thoughts of retiring at 45 to enjoy life.

'When you are successful, it encourages you and you get more involved. As you get more involved, you can't be detached from the business. It becomes part of you,' he says.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.