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Macquarie has hired former Morgan Stanley banker Arthur van Dijk as a managing director in its equity capital markets team in Asia, sources said yesterday. He will take up his new job on December 1.
The move comes about five months after Jeremy Wernert replaced Mark Warburton as Macquarie’s head of Asia ECM on June 1. Wernert is also head of the equity syndicate desk in the region.
Van Dijk was most recently working with Morgan Stanley in Singapore, a role that he took up in January 2009 after the US bank reshuffled some members of its ECM team and split up its Hong Kong-based equity syndicate desk. van Dijk was previously a member of the syndicate team, but as part of the reshuffle he moved to Singapore to take up a role focusing on equity origination for Southeast Asia — a region that Morgan Stanley was beginning to put more emphasis on around that time.
He left Morgan Stanley in February this year. At the time of his departure he was an executive director.
He will return to Hong Kong for his new job at Macquarie, but will have a pan-Asia focus so he should be able to make use of the Southeast Asia expertise he accumulated during his three years in Singapore. During his time there, Morgan Stanley was involved in a number of key deals, including Petronas Chemicals’ record-breaking $4.15 billion IPO in Malaysia, a $1.2 billion rights issue and placement for Bank Negara Indonesia, the Singapore IPO of Tiger Airways and an IPO for Indorama Ventures, a Thai manufacturer of PET plastics, which was followed by a highly successful sell-down by the controlling shareholder a year later.
The bank also worked on several transactions for Temasek, including a sell-down of the firm’s stake in Thai mobile phone and media company Shin Corp.
Macquarie has slipped in the Asian ECM rankings in recent years and the hire of van Dijk suggests it is looking to boost its presence in the region. This year it has been involved in a few large deals, such as the $902 million Hong Kong listing of Yitai Coal and the $1.5 billion IPO of pay-TV operator Astro Malayasia, for which it was one of 13 bookrunners. It also worked on last month’s IPO for Dynasty Reit, which was the first Singapore IPO with an offshore renminbi tranche. However, that deal was cancelled before pricing.
Notable deals in its pipeline include the multi-billion dollar IPO of Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi, the Mongolian coal mining company that is aiming for a triple-listing in Ulaanbaatar, London and Hong Kong, and the upcoming Hong Kong IPO of Chinese insurer PICC.
Van Dijk joined Morgan Stanley’s ECM origination team in London in 2001 straight out of university, and transferred to the equity syndicate desk in Hong Kong at the beginning of 2005.
Macquarie has also hired another ex-Morgan Stanley banker. According to a Macquarie spokesperson, Sofia Liang joined the Australian bank last month as head of ECM for Greater China. She is replacing Danny Wong who has left the firm to become head of Asia ECM at Jefferies.
Liang most recently worked at Morgan Stanley as an executive director for a little more than one-and-a-half years, focusing on China ECM. She left the US bank in August this year. Liang has previously also worked at Citi and has experience from North America and Europe, as well as Asia.
