You were at JPMorgan for quite a while?
I was at JPMorgan for 16 years. I began my career in New York. I did a lot on the advisory M&A side. But before I came to BNP Paribas Peregrine I was the senior country officer for JPMorgan in the PRC. Before that I ran investment banking for JPMorgan in Greater China. And before that I was the head of the infrastructure industry group
What led you to join BNP Paribas Peregrine?
It was time for me to make a change after the merger. I've been with a bulge bracket for a long time. What attracts me to this job is the fact that BNP Paribas Peregrine has all the necessary ingredients to get an M&A shop working. It has a strong regional equity franchise, and a solid client franchise. Along with that it has very good research, and an M&A business can leverage off this. With BNP Paribas, we also have an international network. We need to connect to Europe and the US, because that's an important resource. My mandate is to make sure we are coordinated and we have an M&A franchise to support our target clients.
How would you describe the cultural differences with Morgan?
I've only been here a few days, but I felt surprisingly relaxed and at home here. People do work very hard here. Culturally, it reminds me of the old JPMorgan I used to know. When I started in Hong Kong with JP in 1990 we were a small team, and were very close. And here I already know all the senior people. It's a small environment and you are connected to each other much better.
The difference is that the clients are different. This place is not so rigid, and that's where I have to adjust. Here the communication channel is faster. That's good.
This is a China-focused firm. M&A hasn't been a big business in China. So where are you going to grow the business?
I have a regional mandate. The reality today is that China will continue to be our focus, but the way we will approach it is to pick our own battlefield. We are organized by sectors. And we need to decide quickly which sectors my team will focus on.
Are you going to try and go for the big M&A deals, or the smaller ones?
In our bread and butter business we are not going to compete with the major leaguers on the big cross-border deals. That's just not our strength. Cross-regionally there are areas where we have our strengths in particular in Hong Kong or China. Our target clients are the region's mid-sized companies, but in certain markets such as Hong Kong where we have blue chip clients we will continue to ensure we provide our fair share of service to them.
Are you going to expand your team?
I don't believe in big teams. I believe in good teams. We want to grow this business, but at this point the way that I look at it is that we may have to reallocate our resources to create the maximum leverage .. At the moment, we have five M&A professionals. But then it depends how you count it - we have people in the industry team doing M&A and people in Singapore doing M&A too. If we grow this team, I don't think we need more than 10.
There's a lot of lead time in building an M&A franchise. Does that mean we can't expect to see the fruits of your work for six months?
It will take even longer. Based on our client base, I want to go and tell them what we see happening in financial services or the pharmaceuticals sector going forward. Or even in the PC peripheral sector. Hopefully, in nine to twelve months time, and market is right, we'll be involved.
What do you think the dominant M&A trends will be next year?
FIG will continue to see consolidation. We've seen some in Singapore, but Hong Kong is not yet done completely. Taiwan has a long way to go, and Korea too. With the WTO in China, that will cause certain things to happen there too. The logistics area is another interesting one. The domestic logistics business has to consolidate and foreigners have to come in. China also has 6000 pharmaceuticals manufacturers today. In the end how many does China need - three, maybe six?
