Aaron Chow, who will start work in early July, will take up a new position as managing director and head of event driven syndicate within the bankÆs leveraged and acquisition finance division. Essentially, this means he will be responsible for the distribution and sales.
Chow has more than 15 years of banking and leveraged finance experience. At UBS he was head of syndicated finance within global leveraged finance, focusing on leveraged buyouts and mergers and acquisitions in this region for financial sponsors and corporates.
He will be based in Hong Kong and report to David Simons, HSBCÆs head of leveraged and acquisition finance for Asia-Pacific.
The hiring of new people û Simons stresses that Chow will not be the only hire as he continues to build the team û at a time when leveraged finance activity has slowed significantly and its rivals are focusing on cutting costs, can be partly explained by the fact that HSBC uses a broad definition for event-driven leveraged finance, including not only leveraged private equity finance, but also corporate acquisition finance, bridge finance and infrastructure acquisition finance.
Private equity financing is clearly down this year, but according to Simons there is still a lot of need for corporate acquisition financing û both leveraged and non-leveraged û as the drop in equity valuations has led to more takeover opportunities. At present, companies also have less competition from private equity firms.
ôOur business model is more defensive because it includes both private equity financing and corporate acquisition and infrastructure financing,ö Simons says. But, he adds, it also ôreflects HSBCÆs strategy to have a finance-led focus on emerging marketsö.
As part of this focus, the bank said yesterday that it will integrate its existing syndicated finance team into the leveraged and acquisition finance division, to create a single loan underwriting platform under SimonsÆ leadership. Phil Lipton, who is currently head of syndicated finance for Asia-Pacific, will take on a new role as managing director and head of corporate loan syndicate, working alongside Chow and reporting to Simons. Lipton will, however, also retain a reporting line to Stephen Williams, the bankÆs head of global capital markets for Asia-Pacific.
The enlarged team will initially have 20 bankers, Simons says, but will ôcontinue to expandö.
This latest move comes exactly one year (to the day) after Simons came over to HSBC from Credit Suisse to build up the bankÆs leveraged finance capabilities with a mandate to cover all the earlier mentioned finance situations across the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan and Australasia. Since then the bank has provided financing for a series of notable transactions including the privatisation of Maxis Communications in Malaysia, PermiraÆs $2.2 billion acquisition of Japanese agrochemicals company Arysta LifeSciences, and earlier this year, Tata ChemicalÆs $1 billion acquisition of US-based General Chemical Industrial Products.
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