Chatterji to head Asia DCM for J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan has promoted Rohit Chatterji to a newly created role as head of its Asia debt capital markets business. Chatterji, who is currently head of Southeast Asia corporate finance, will move to Hong Kong from his current base in Singapore for the new job.
 
Chatterji, who has 12 years' experience at J.P. Morgan across Asia and has been a managing director since 2006, will have primary responsibility for developing the firm's DCM business in emerging Asia. He will report to Todd Marin, head of Asia-Pacific investment banking.

"Creative structuring and corporate finance-based solutions are critical components in providing attractive debt financing for our Asian clients," said Marin in a written statement. "Rohit's broad experience underpins this solutions-based approach and will accelerate the progress we've made in building our DCM franchise in Asia."

Chatterji takes up a position intended to bring various parts of J.P. Morgan's debt offering under one person. His mandate will include the role Timothy Donahue had as head of high-yield and leveraged finance, said a source. Donahue was head of Asia-Pacific leveraged finance when he left J.P. Morgan in May last year to join GSO Capital Partners in Hong Kong. Donahue is now rejoining J.P. Morgan in the US.

"On the back of its balance sheet strength and the competitive advantage the US bank currently enjoys relative to some of its competitors, J.P. Morgan has created this role to offer financing solutions for its clients," said a person with inside knowledge of the situation, who added that obviously, the solutions are expected to better meet client's needs as well as be more profitable than plain vanilla solutions.

This is Chatterji's second stint in Hong Kong with J.P. Morgan. He was here from 1998 to 2003, first in the capacity of a telecommunications, power and utilities industry specialist and later as part of the North Asia M&A team. Chatterji moved to Singapore in 2004 to build up the corporate finance and M&A practice there as head of Southeast Asia corporate finance.

Chatterji is an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad and has also worked in Mumbai with ICICI's investment banking subsidiary, ICICI Securities.

Chatterji's previous role will be taken over by two Singapore-based executive directors, Daniel Kleijn and  Hong Ping Yeo, who will co-head Southeast Asia corporate finance and M&A.
 
Kleijn started his career with J.P. Morgan in the M&A team in London and then worked in the Frankfurt and Sydney offices. In 2004, when UBS in Australia hired J.P. Morgan's utilities, power and infrastructure investment banking team led by David di Pilla, Kleijn moved to UBS as part of di Pilla's team. J.P. Morgan hired Kleijn back from UBS in 2008.

Hong Ping Yeo, who joined J.P. Morgan in 2000 from HSBC, is also the head of real estate investment banking for Southeast Asia. Yeo has experience in both the equity capital markets and real estate franchises in Southeast Asia.

Appointing Kleijn and Yeo as co-heads ensures that both the M&A and ECM sides of the business are well-covered for Southeast Asia, said a source close to the development. Both will report to Philip Lee, J.P. Morgan's head of Southeast Asia investment banking.

The appointments in Asia come exactly a week after J.P. Morgan announced blockbuster results for the second quarter of 2009, beating analysts expectations. J.P. Morgan earned a net income of $2.7 billion in the quarter on record revenues of $28 billion. Investment banking earned profits of $1.5 billion on revenues of $7.3 billion. Investment banking fee revenue for the quarter was $2.2 billion.

Fixed income markets revenue for the quarter were $4.9 billion. On the earnings call, in response to a question from an analyst, CEO Jamie Dimon said the firm is picking up market share in its various fixed income trading businesses, according to a transcript posted on seekingalpha.

"Throughout this whole crisis we've been open," said Dimon. "We've been making markets, we've been trading and obviously some people weren't."

Analysts on the call questioned how the US investment bank would repeat the record revenues and profits of this quarter and Dimon replied that he was making a philosophical statement saying "we're going to have great bankers calling on great clients, doing real business the best way we can do it".