His father owned movie theatres, and the boy had private Chinese lessons and violin rehearsals.

His father owned movie theatres, and the boy had private Chinese lessons and violin rehearsals. He attended the University of San Carlos in Cebu and graduated valedictorian from primary school, the best student in the building.

Then his father died when he was 13, and all of it disappeared.
The theatres, the lessons, the money, the future.

And John Gokongwei found himself on a bicycle, peddling thread and soap and candles along the streets of Cebu to feed his mother and siblings.

He was 13 years old.
By 17, he was loading goods onto a wooden boat and sailing them to Manila to sell.
By 51, he was earning his MBA at De La Salle University, sitting in a classroom alongside students half his age.

And by the time he died at 93, he was the third richest man in the Philippines, with a conglomerate spanning food, airlines, retail, telecoms, petrochemicals, and power worth over $20 billion in combined market capitalisation.

His wife Elizabeth died exactly one week after he did.

His biography was called "riches to rags to riches." Most people only get one of those.

John Robinson Lim Gokongwei Jr. was born on August 11, 1926, in Xiamen, China. His father came from a wealthy Cebu-based family with ancestral roots in Fujian Province, and his great-grandfather, Pedro Singson Gotiaoco, had been one of the most prominent Chinese Filipinos of his era.

The family ran theatres, traded goods, and lived well.

Gokongwei attended the University of San Carlos in Cebu for primary and high school, graduating valedictorian.
His father, John Sr., died in 1939 from typhoid fever.
The boy was 13. The family fortune evaporated, and so did his childhood.

He never went to college. He got on a bicycle instead.

During the Japanese Occupation, from 1943 to 1945, the teenage Gokongwei became a trader, loading his goods onto a wooden boat and sailing from Cebu to Dalahican in Lucena, then trucking them to Manila. He was 17 years old, navigating a war zone, selling whatever he could carry.

After the war, he started a small import company called Amasia Trading, bringing in flour, onions, fruits, used clothing, old newspapers, and magazines from the United States.

When his brothers and sisters returned from China where they'd sheltered during the war, the family added cigarettes and whiskey to the business.

But by 1957, Gokongwei realised that trading would always mean low margins and dependence on government policy.

He wanted to build something.
So he borrowed 500,000 pesos from Albino Sycip, then chairman of China Bank, and Dee K. Chiong, and opened a corn milling plant producing glucose and corn starch.

He called it Universal Corn Products.

It would eventually become Universal Robina Corporation, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the Philippines, the biggest in snack foods, and a regional player across Southeast Asia. San Miguel Corporation was one of his earliest customers. And according to Gokongwei himself, the corn starch business caused a price war that cost a young chemical engineer named Lucio Tan his job. Tan later jested with Gokongwei about it. Two of the richest men in the Philippines, connected by a bag of corn starch.

In 1961, he established Consolidated Food Corporation, which launched Blend 45, the instant coffee brand that became a household name across the Philippines.
The company later merged with Universal Robina.

And then, in the early 1970s, something unusual happened.

Gokongwei was already running a major corporation, but he decided to go back to school, attending the 14-week Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 1972.

Then he enrolled in the MBA programme at De La Salle University, studying part-time as a working student for four years. In 1977, at the age of 51 and without a college degree, he earned his MBA, sitting in classes with students who could have been his children. He earned the diploma anyway, and he later said it was one of the proudest moments of his life.

He never stopped learning because he never forgot what it felt like to have his education taken away at 13.

The empire kept growing.
In 1990, he floated JG Summit Holdings on the Manila Stock Exchange as the holding company for the entire group.

In 1996, he launched Cebu Pacific Air, the low-cost carrier that made flying affordable for ordinary Filipinos.

The airline that started with a handful of routes eventually became the Philippines' largest budget carrier, and in 2010 placed a $3 billion order with Airbus.

He built Robinsons Department Store and Robinsons Land Corporation, one of the country's biggest property developers and mall operators. He built Sun Cellular for $800 million and sold it for $1.7 billion. In 2013, his company acquired San Miguel Corporation's stake in Meralco, the country's largest power distributor, for close to $1.8 billion.

A bicycle in Cebu. A wooden boat in the Visayan Sea. A corn starch factory, an airline, a telecom company, a power distributor, and a $20 billion conglomerate. The line from one to the next is unbroken.

Gokongwei married Elizabeth Yu in 1958.

They'd first met when he was a small-time importer with a tiny store in Cebu and she was the daughter of a hardware shop owner.

He was about 23 or 24.
She was 17.
He pursued her for four years before she agreed to marry him.

They had six children: five daughters and one son, Lance, who now leads the group as president and CEO.

In 2008, Forbes Asia included Gokongwei on its first Heroes of Philanthropy list. He donated P200 million to the Ateneo de Manila's school of management, and gave generously to the University of San Carlos, Xavier School, De La Salle, and several other institutions. He believed, with the conviction of a man who'd lost his own education at 13, that school was the way out of poverty.

He once said: "Entrepreneurship is a way out of poverty." He spent his life proving it, and then he spent his fortune making sure other people could prove it too.

John Gokongwei died on November 9, 2019, at Manila Doctors Hospital.
He was 93 years old.

Exactly one week later, on November 16, his wife Elizabeth died.
She was 85.

They'd been married for 61 years. No one in the family has ever explained the timing. Some things don't need explaining.

======================

John Gokongwei....

At 13, he was a valedictorian with violin lessons and a father who owned theatres, and at 14 he was a boy on a bicycle, selling soap to feed his family.

By 17, he was sailing a wooden boat through a war zone, and by 51 he was sitting in a university classroom earning the degree he'd never had the chance to get.
At 93, he was the third richest man in the Philippines.

And the thing that connects all of those ages, all of those versions of the same man, is something you can't teach in an MBA programme and can't buy with a billion-dollar conglomerate.

It's the willingness to start again.
Every single time.
From nothing if necessary.

A boy on a bicycle in Cebu.

That's where it started. That's where it always starts.