50 Years of Asia: Laura Cha, HKEX
9 May, 201950 Years of Asia: Piyush Gupta
9 May, 2019Euromoney: May 9 2019
Read the full article here: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9fm4bc6p0yg/wei-sun-christianson-the-right-person-in-the-right-place
Few people illustrate the rise of China in global investment banking better than Wei Sun Christianson.
Born in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, she elevated herself through education. She became the first mainland Chinese student ever to graduate from Amherst College, went to Columbia Law School and took Hong Kong by storm after moving there in 1992.
Today she is Morgan Stanley’s China chief executive and Asia Pacific co-chief executive.
As a mainland woman in a male-dominated profession, everyone in banking knows her, but not everyone knows she was involved in setting up the regulatory structure for Chinese companies to be listed in Hong Kong while working at the Securities and Futures Commission, reporting to Laura Cha. These rules would pave the way for the deals that later made her career; as a mainlander with securities law training and a US passport, she was the right person in the right place at the right time.
“It was a great experience,” she says now. “It was a very dynamic market, yet at the same time was not yet well-incorporated into the rest of the world.” While there she saw what she still considers one of the most important ever deals in Hong Kong: the 1993 dual listing of Shanghai Petrochemical in Hong Kong and New York, the first of its kind.
“That was the most challenging deal,” she says. It was the first time Hong Kong authorities had had to understand the mechanisms of US listings, such as the New York Stock Exchange’s stabilization mechanism; the rule changes that came with it enabled simultaneous listings in Hong Kong and New York.
As a banker, joining Morgan Stanley in 1998, Christianson would spend a lot of her time on deals that mirrored the pioneers she had seen at the SFC, most obviously Sinopec’s landmark three-way listing in Hong Kong, New York and London in October 2000, raising $3.73 billion.
“Looking back, that was an inflexion point for Hong Kong to start to open up,” says Christianson.
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1f9fm4bc6p0yg/wei-sun-christianson-the-right-person-in-the-right-place?copyrightInfo=true
