It’s been about nine years since New World Hospitality, the Hong Kong-based company owned by Sonia Cheng’s family, bought Rosewood Hotels from Dallas-based hotelier Caroline Rose Hunt for $229.5 million. Cheng became CEO of New World and rebranded the enterprise as Rosewood Hotel Group. She was 30. “There was the element from competitors: ‘Well, here comes the daughter of a tycoon, playing hotel,’” Rosewood Hong Kong managing director Marc Brugger told CNBC last year. But Cheng quickly silenced the skeptics. Rosewood, a management company, operates but doesn’t own most of its properties, but under Cheng, the family purchased some of its prestige real estate, including the Carlyle in New York, and revamped them. She also expanded the brand into Asia, starting with Rosewood Beijing in 2014. But her crowning achievement came in 2019 with the opening of Rosewood Hong Kong. The new hotel, which occupies 43 stories of a 65-story tower on Victoria Harbour, has a special meaning to Cheng and her family: It sits on the site of what was once the New World Centre, a mixed-use development her grandfather built in the 1970s that housed Hong Kong’s Regent Hotel, which Cheng’s father managed early in his career and where Cheng grew up.
