Why the China rainmaker just won’t go away I The ins and outs of mandate hunting
Lee Zhang: at the top of the Deutsche tree I Fang Fenglei and Fred Hu: one bank, two rainmakers I Henry Cai: a new breed of dealmaker
 |
Zhang Liping: reputation built on getting deals done |
Zhang Liping and Janice Hu of Credit Suisse are China’s quiet rainmakers. Both shy away from the limelight, preferring to let their deal records speak for themselves.
They also embody two diverse but equally effective strains of rainmaker.
Zhang seems to have been around for ever, having worked on many of the landmark stock sales of state-run mainland firms in the 1990s.
Like Merrill Lynch’s Erhfei Liu, another oft-cited China rainmaker who is currently moving to a more private equity-focused position at his bank, Zhang is not a so-called princeling, one of the coterie of bankers, financiers, and social and business climbers related to senior Beijing mandarins. His reputation has been built on a solid ability to get deals done, rather than rely on family connections.
Thin, wiry and ascetic, Zhang spent seven years in the 1990s with Merrill Lynch, where he completed several landmark transactions including the initial public offering of Shanghai Petrochemical, which in 1993 became the first mainland firm to list shares simultaneously in Hong Kong and New York. He also helped to complete a $1 billion global sovereign bond deal in 1994 – the first such issuance by the People’s Republic of China.
The 49-year-old banker also headed Dresdner Banking Group’s greater China operations, and spent several years in the corporate sector, as CEO of Hong Kong-based computer graphics firm Imagi International, and another diversified Hong Kong corporate, Pacific Concord Holdings.
Credit Suisse shocked the market in September 2004 when it hired Zhang as its new China country head, replacing another nomadic mainland banker, Wei Christianson, who decamped first to Citigroup and, more recently, to Morgan Stanley, where she rejoined her mentor, John Mack.
Despite adding intellectual and deal-making heft to Credit Suisse’s team, rival bankers at first wondered if Zhang was up to the task after so many years in the corporate sector. The whispers grew as he struggled to build a team capable of dragging in major China stock sales.
Any concerns were wiped out when in 2005 he pulled off a real coup: winning, almost at the last minute, the right to co-underwrite China Construction Bank’s $9.2 billion Hong Kong stock sale. The deal left Morgan Stanley seething but Credit Suisse bankers credit Zhang fully with bagging the deal, after convincing CCB that Morgan and co-underwriter CICC needed help pulling it off.
"That was Liping’s deal," says a Credit Suisse insider. "He was the one that got us in the door there. There were half a dozen banks trying to tie up the third underwriting slot (along with CICC and Morgan Stanley) but Liping beat them all."
Zhang was also instrumental in bringing Janice Hu back into the fold. Hu is young – still in her 30s – and spent nearly two years at Merrill Lynch after an earlier stint at Credit Suisse. She’s credited with putting the Swiss bank on the underwriting ticket of the world’s biggest-ever initial stock sale – the October 2006 $21.9 billion IPO of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – and has worked on several other major stock sales during her two terms at Credit Suisse, including shipping firm Sinotrans, China Netcom, and China Pacific Insurance; and boasts close relations to the finance ministry.
Hu epitomizes the other side of the rainmaking coin – the mainland banker with impeccable family connections. Her grandfather, Hu Yaobang, was one of the reformers who opened China up to the modern world after Mao died, rising to the post of general secretary of China’s Communist Party. He was forced to leave the post in 1987, however, by former premier Deng Xiaoping, and his death two years later led to the Tiananmen Square protests.
Despite that, Hu senior remains revered in China and even throughout the Communist Party, and his granddaughter’s contacts undoubtedly help her open doors in Beijing that would otherwise remain firmly shut. That said, colleagues say she doesn’t trade on her family name – much. Sources close to the banker, who became Credit Suisse’s vice-chairman of China investment banking earlier this year, say she is good-natured, modest and unassuming. One colleague notes that she’s a team player who, while not the greatest executor of deals on the planet, "knows and understands the banking world, and works constantly to make herself better at her job".
Rivals suggest it’s a bone of contention in Janice Hu’s family that she moved into the high-octane world of international investment banking. Some might say, though, that a youth spent hobnobbing with Beijing’s princelings and wandering the secretive Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing that harbours China’s political elite was probably a good introduction to another, equally paranoid, shadowy and back-stabbing world.