50 Years of Asia: Weijian Shan, PAG
9 May, 201950 Years of Asia: Teh Hong Piow, Public Bank
9 May, 2019Euromoney, May 9 2019
Read the full article here: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9gzqxp101nn/alan-smith-pioneering-hong-kongs-markets
It’s hard to recall now, but for more than 20 years Jardine Fleming was the name to beat in Hong Kong merchant banking. From its launch in 1970 as a joint venture between the ultimate British Hong Kong firm, Jardine Matheson, and Scottish asset manager Robert Fleming, to its sale to JPMorgan Chase in 2000, it was a pioneer, not only dominating markets but often inventing them in the first place.
Nobody was as influential in that journey as Alan Smith, who joined in 1972 and was later chief executive for 11 years and chairman for a further two. Smith had come to Hong Kong to teach law in 1970.
“When I came here, it absolutely was not a financial centre,” he says over lunch in Tai Kwun, the redeveloped police station and barracks; in earlier days Smith, a justice of the peace, has visited its jail. “It was a place that made cheap toys and textiles. The fourth-biggest business here was human hair wigs.”
Finance didn’t come into it and, with the Cultural Revolution underway in China, there was no business from there. Setting up a merchant bank was therefore a leap of faith for all involved. The founders went to see John Cowperthwaite, the financial secretary of Hong Kong, to tell him their plans and seek whatever permissions might be required.
“Jolly good,” Cowperthwaite told them. “But I don’t really know why you came to see me. As long as you don’t break the law, good luck.”
Smith was involved in Hong Kong’s first-ever contested takeover bid, helping Hong Kong Land buy Dairy Farm in 1972, “which at the time, largely, was a farm up in Pokfulam,” he says. “Of course our client’s interest was the real estate: they didn’t want cows wasting it.”
There weren’t really any rules for takeovers and there was talk of following the British code – “like playing mahjong to the rules of bridge,” Smith recalls – and Smith ended up being the principal author of Hong Kong’s takeover code himself.
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9gzqxp101nn/alan-smith-pioneering-hong-kongs-markets?copyrightInfo=true
