UBS has appointed two senior bankers in China and upped its stake in the mainland Chinese securities joint venture that bears its name, the Swiss bank said on Monday.
UBS said it completed the purchase of a 4.99% stake in UBS Securities from the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. The transaction, which saw UBS's stake in the JV rise to 25% from 20%, hasn’t been publicly announced but the bank confirmed the deal when reached by FinanceAsia on Monday evening.
In 2012 Chinese regulators upwardly adjusted the percentage of equity foreign investors can hold in Chinese securities houses to 49% from 33%.
In a separate statement, UBS also said that Eugene Qian had joined the bank as China country head and president and that He Di has been named chairman of the Swiss bank's mainland securities arm.
Qian has worked in the mainland and Hong Kong banking industry for more than two decades and is filling a post vacated by David Li, UBS’s former China chairman, who left to join JPMorgan last year. He joins UBS from Citi, where he has been since 2007, serving as president and a board director of Citi China, the Swiss bank said in its statement.
The UBS appointment is a return engagement for Qian, who previously worked at the bank in 1996, posted to the investment banking division in Hong Kong for seven years. At the time he handled cross-border mergers and acquisitions and capital market transactions, focusing on deals in the power and energy sectors in China and throughout Asia.
Qian moved to Deutsche Bank in 2003 and spent four years there leading the bank’s natural resources investment banking team for Asia (ex-Japan). He was a member of the German bank’s Asia-Pacific global banking executive committee. He graduated from Fudan University in China and holds Master and Doctorate degrees in politics from Oxford University.
He Di, meanwhile, a veteran banker who has worked at UBS for almost two decades, has been appointed to head the bank’s Chinese securities arm, which also used to be overseen by David Li.
He joined the bank in 1997 and became head of its investment bank division in China after the bank merged with Swiss Banking Corporation in 1998. In 2001, he was named vice chairman of UBS’s Asian investment banking division.
During his stint at UBS, He led a number of the bank’s landmark deals in China, including the $11.2 billion initial public offering of Bank of China and the $2.7 billion flotation of China Merchants Bank in 2006.
He was also involved in setting up UBS's securities platform and obtaining its first Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor licence in China, according to the bank.
