Danny Zigal

Danny is fourth generation Hong Kong, European by descent, Cantonese speaking. His family has been in Asia since 1931, when his great-grandfather Leon Zigal founded Triangle Motors in Shanghai and moved it to Hong Kong as the civil war closed in. The triangle in the Praya seal is his.

He spends his time between Hong Kong and Europe, moving between the families, factories and trading houses that make things happen in this part of the world and the Western owners who want in.

He holds positions in manufacturing in China and has traded commodities and chemicals between Asia and the West since 2004, adding agricultural inputs in 2014. During the pandemic, when the usual routes closed, that network was how a good deal of supply kept moving.

On the consumer side he founded Synergy Distribution in 2007 and has taken Western brands into Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia for twenty years, several of them from a standing start in China, online and offline. He built Rio Mints from nothing into a brand selling across five markets on three continents.

What people come to him for is judgement: whether a thing will work here, who it should be done with, and how it should be structured so it holds. He is a director of ICD Group International, the family trading house founded in 1994, and holds principal positions in consumer brands and advisory roles with equity.

He read Economics at the University of Southern California.