Before China became the world’s second-largest economy and Northeast Asia was held out as home to the planet’s most dynamic markets, Melissa Ma and the co-founders of Asia Alternatives had already jumped in.
It was a gamble that has since paid off in spades.
Demand to participate in its most recent fund — Asia Alternative Capital Partners lV — was strong enough to induce Ma and her partners to break the hard cap limit on the fund size of $950 million.
AACPIV closed at $1.8 billion in May.
One of the earliest fund of funds houses in the region, Asia Alternatives now has $6.5 billion under discretionary management. They recently marked their tenth year in Asian private equity, a decade spent building close relationships with managers and institutions, and establishing a track record.
Pan-Asian in outlook, Ma, the Asia Alternatives team, and the managers they back, have risen to the challenges posed by China and endured periods when exits seemed harder than pulling teeth and IPOs came to a complete standstill.
Ma and her two co-founders, Rebecca Xu and Laure Wang, investment bankers who did time on Wall Street, decided a risk-free life doing someone else’s bidding was not for them. They went about developing their own platform and investment philosophy, evaluating investments across sectors for relative risk-adjusted returns.
Although they closed AACPlV in May, they had already begun an investment programme by the middle of last year. At present they expect to allocate the remainder of the fund to managers outside Greater China: up to a third in Japan and Korea; 10% to 20% in India; and then the rest across Southeast Asia, and potentially Australasia.
Ma travels between Asia Alternatives’s offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and San Francisco, managing a 35-member far-flung team.
Ma is proud of the firm’s accomplishments (they were the first and, as of 2011, the only LP to receive a Qualified Foreign Limited Partner under a pilot programme by the Shanghai government) and are now interested in finding ways to pay it forward, giving back to society through participation in charity organizations like Half the Sky and Room to Read.
Securing commitments from limited partners today, having a decade of track record baking them up, is far less daunting than when they began as private equity neophytes; roughly half of the LPs who committed funds to AACPlV are loyal investors who have been with the Asia Alternatives since the early days.
FinanceAsia’s 2015 list of the most influential women across the Asia-Pacific region spans investment and commercial bankers.
Published as a feature in the July/August 2015 print edition of FinanceAsia, the series also presents leading women in new areas of finance such as fintech where Asian companies are among the fastest-growing in the world.
We also canvassed corporate financiers for exceptional women working in deal advisory including lawyers and accountants. In the process of researching the series, we found evidence of progress in creating more diverse workplaces in the region.
