Flagship fashion - Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants

about to travel to the northwest of England
to check in with staff at the Harvey Nichols
store in Manchester.
In 1996, five years after Dickson Concepts
took over Harvey Nichols, with the
company back in the black and with credible
plans for expansion, Wan took the company
public, with an initial public offering on the
London Stock Exchange that was more than
16 times oversubscribed. There was something
of a trend for high-end names to list at
that time: Donna Karan floated on the New
York Stock Exchange the same year.
While profits were robust for Harvey
Nichols in the years to follow, other clothing
retailers fared less well as the Asian finan-
cial crisis began to bite and as strong British
retailing names like Marks & Spencer reported
weak results. By the late 1990s, Wan
says, analysts were downgrading small-cap
companies and fashion retailers because of
general market sentiment rather than company-specific
factors.
Harvey Nichols was twice downgraded
within a 24-month period, and was trading
below its IPO price. “We felt very disillusioned,”
he recalls. “What’s the point of all
this effort with compliance to maintain the
listing?” The decision to take the company
private was made in 2003.
Wan now oversees the company from the
top floor of a new, purpose-built office block
A PLUS
in Chiswick, west London, at the same desk
he inherited from his predecessor two decades
ago. Many of the pictures on the walls,
of the Knightsbridge store in days gone by,
also came with the job. A photo of his two
daughters is one of the few personal touches.
His CPA and chartered arbitrator certificates
are also displayed. “It’s certainly not luxurious
but I don’t need that,” he says.
Some like it haute
The view from his office over this low-rise
and largely residential pocket of London is
a long way from the book shop in Ice House
Street, Central, where a teenage Joseph Wan
mulled over his future career path. “Even at
the age of 14, I was thinking about going into
the legal profession or accountancy,” he recalls.
“I remember picking up a lot of books
about career guidance, and reading about
CPAs in America – all about it being a very respected
profession with high integrity.”
Ever practical, Wan opted to do his article
training in Britain, given the colonial ties
with Hong Kong and the relative ease of travel
and transferring qualifications compared
to the U.S. After qualifying, he returned to
Hong Kong to join Peat Marwick.
“I was very lucky,” he recalls. “I was given
a lot of exposure to different things.”
“Initially, I did the standard work on auditing
of hotels, motor distributors, finance,
deposit-taking companies, all these kind of
things, tax compliance work, tax claiming
and a little bit of debt restructuring,” he says.
“I was really covering a wide range of business
activities.”
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