Merle Allan Hinrich is an American businessman and philanthropist. He founded the Hong Kong trade publishing business that became Global Sources, a business-to-business media and trade exhibition company he led until its sale in 2017, and established the Hinrich Foundation in 2012. He moved his company's Asian supplier catalogues onto the internet in the mid-1990s, and in 2013, as a trustee of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, resigned in opposition to the school's agreement with the for-profit company Laureate Education.
Hinrich is a native of Glenvil, Nebraska. He graduated from Hastings High School and received a Bachelor of Arts in education from Kearney State College, now the University of Nebraska at Kearney, in 1964. He completed a master's degree in 1965 at the American Institute for Foreign Trade, later the Thunderbird School of Global Management, in Arizona. The university awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1996 and a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2025.
Hinrich moved to Asia in 1965, shortly after completing his master's degree, and sold advertising for The Importer, a trade publication based in Tokyo. The work took him across the region and brought him into contact with manufacturers and suppliers that had few means of reaching buyers and retailers in the United States and Europe.
He co-founded Trade Media Limited in Hong Kong in 1970 and launched its first magazine, Asian Sources, in 1971, going on to lead the company as its chief executive and later chairman through the rest of the 1990s. Further titles followed, among them Electronic Components, Timepieces and Gifts & Home Products, which carried advertising for light industrial goods made in Asia and circulated to importers abroad. Advertising and subscription revenue reached about $62 million in 1999, roughly two-thirds of the company's total.
From the late 1980s, the company developed order-processing software and electronic data interchange services for importers, among them Liz Claiborne. Hinrich launched Asian Sources Online in 1995. Listings were gathered by a sales force of around 700 representatives who visited factories with digital cameras and laptops to photograph products and upload the results. By 1999, the business acted as an online intermediary in trade between Asian manufacturers and Western buyers worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and Hinrich resisted being labelled "Asia's e-commerce king". In April 2000, the business reached the Nasdaq through a reverse merger with Fairchild, a Bermuda-registered optical disc equipment company, and his holding of about 15 per cent was valued at $119 million. Trading as Global Sources, the company expanded into trade exhibitions.
Blackstone approached Hinrich, then executive chairman, with a non-binding indication of interest in January 2017. He told the board he intended to sell all of his shares in any sale of the company and would not retain an ownership interest or management role afterwards, and asked Blackstone to raise its offer to $18.00 per share. As of June 2017 he was the controlling shareholder, deemed to hold up to approximately 64.86 per cent of the issued shares. The sale completed that year and Global Sources was delisted.
Hinrich was an alumnus and trustee of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, and around 1994 gave more than $1 million towards completing a library on its campus. The school conferred an honorary Doctor of International Law on him in 2010.
In March 2013, the school's board approved a $66 million alliance with Laureate Education, under which Laureate would buy and lease back the campus and take part in a jointly owned services venture. Hinrich resigned from the board, writing in his resignation letter that the transaction was "a tragedy for Thunderbird and a total windfall for Laureate". Five trustees resigned over the agreement and nearly 2,000 alumni signed a petition against it.
Hinrich said the school had approached too few prospective partners and had settled on the option offering money rather than weighing quality, continuity or the suitability of the partner. He objected to terms giving Laureate majority control of the joint venture's board, the position of landlord to the school and seats on the school's own board, which he said left Thunderbird at risk of being directed by a for-profit company. Laureate's chief executive, Douglas Becker, responded that critics had offered no alternative plan for a school facing declining fundraising, a $4 million deficit and falling rankings.
A formal complaint was submitted to the Higher Learning Commission, Thunderbird's accreditor, in February 2014 on behalf of Hinrich, four other former alumni trustees and the Thunderbird Independent Alumni Association, asking the commission to refuse the school's change of control application.
Hinrich established the Hinrich Foundation in 2012 and has served as its chairman. It funds research, education and scholarships relating to international trade. He chaired its council of members by 2014 while still executive chairman of Global Sources and the foundation became his principal activity after the 2017 sale. Hong Kong Baptist University made him an Honorary University Fellow in 2015 for the foundation's support of a scholarship programme there.