Meet the CEO of a 184-year-old drugstore chain with more stores than CVS or Walgreens

Watsons, the flagship brand of AS Watson, likely isn’t a household name to U.S. readers. But the green-colored drugstore can be found all over Asia (and further beyond): Not just in its home base of Hong Kong and nearby mainland China, but also Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Turkey. There are even 200 outlets in Ukraine.

We hosted our second-ever Fortune Innovation Forum last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with two days of conversations around geopolitics, AI, healthcare, finance, and corporate leadership. But the speaker our guests were perhaps most keen to see spoke at our gala dinner: Malina Ngai, the group CEO of global health and beauty giant, AS Watson. (Another claim to fame: She won a bronze medal for Hong Kong in rowing during the 1994 Asian Games).

AS Watson’s portfolio covers 17,000 outlets across 31 markets; that’s more stores than either CVS or Walgreens. It’s also older than both those brands: Walgreens started in 1901, CVS in 1963. AS Watson’s first store dates to 1841, making the brand as old as Hong Kong itself.

That heritage is on Ngai’s mind. “I have to ensure I deliver today’s results and be an organization that can stay fit for the future, the next 180 years. That’s really scary,” she told me onstage. She said she often finds herself thinking back to the company’s founder and namesake, a British pharmacist named Alexander Skirving Watson, and how he might view the company today. “I believe that he’d be positively surprised that [we’ve gone] from one store to 17,000 stores,” she says.

Ngai took over the CEO job in early 2024 (though she’s been at AS Watson for over two decades). It’s been an eventful year, between inflation, geopolitical tensions, new protectionist policies, a sluggish Chinese economy, and natural disasters. Still, this uncertainty hasn’t hurt the company: CK Hutchison, AS Watson’s parent, reported $12.6 billion in retail revenue for the first six months of the year, an 8% jump year-on-year.

She took an interesting lesson from the past year. “The thing I learned last year was to smile more,” Ngai told me. “In the last 12 to 18 months, you had to make decisions every day–new decisions, difficult decisions, big or small,” she remembered.

Drugstores used to have a number of female CEOs, between former CVS Health and Walgreens Boots Alliance CEOs Karen Lynch and Roz Brewer. But Ngai is now one of the few remaining female CEOs in the space–and the only one leading a company as old as AS Watson.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that AS Watson’s parent company, the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison, was planning to list the retail company in both Hong Kong and London, potentially raising as much as $2 billion. (CK Hutchison declined to comment to the WSJ).

She was the sixth most powerful woman in business in Asia according to Fortune’s 2025 ranking. Perhaps she’ll continue to rise in stature. Leadership is “not so much about the title,” she argues. “It’s about the influence, the empathy and the impact the individual can create in the company.”

Nicholas Gordon
nicholas.gordon@fortune.com

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"I intend to have a really longstanding career and business and empire eventually—that I am going to build."

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