Ask Michael Byungju Kim about his formative experience as an investment banker and his mind jumps back to New York almost 12 years ago. He had just joined Goldman Sachs out of college and was watching while a senior partner flicked through his pitchbook. “The partner had red braces, a guy at his feet shining his shoes, and was talking to a client on the phone. Meanwhile he was making red marks all over my pitch and punching holes in my analysis and finding holes in my argument,” recalls Kim.
“I thought, in 10 years I want to be that guy.” Minus the red braces and the shoe-shiner, he is. The new chief operating officer for Salomon Smith Barney’s Asian investment-banking activities showed his juggling prowess during the interview for this profile. As well as grabbing a quick lunch, he managed to slip out for a five-minute briefing with Salomon Smith Barney boss James Dimon, go and say hello to a couple of clients in a pitch, and meet a prospective hire for his mergers and acquisitions team. All without being rude.
His schedule is hectic. “I’m doing the COO job from a plane right now,” he says. Kim is spending about half his time in his native South Korea, where he has long been the firm’s chief rainmaker, and half in Hong Kong. In fact, he was supposed to relocate permanently to Hong Kong last month, but with the scope of the business in Korea ballooning by the day the move has been delayed.
Kim, who has worked on five of the six biggest M&A deals to come out of Korea in the past few years, is currently focusing his energies on the biggest deal of all time, a $9 billion bond for the Korean government. When it’s completed, lead managers Salomon and Goldman Sachs will net $90 million between them, assuming a standard 1% fee.
“This is a great time to be an investment banker,” says Kim, who insists that rather than retrenching in Korea the firm is building in the hope of an M&A boom. No-one doubts that he is well placed to take advantage of such activity. He is the son-in-law of Korea’s new economic tsar, Park Tae Joon, who has embraced the task of reforming the country’s large industrial chaebols with a fervour.
Kim is understandably sensitive on the subject of his 70-year-old father-in-law, who has four daughters and no sons. He says the last thing he wants to do is compromise his father-in-law, and he points out that the last president’s son spent time in prison for doing just that. “Even internally at Salomon Smith Barney a lot of people don’t know who my father-in-law is,” he says.
His connections in Seoul are excellent anyway. One good friend and squash opponent, for example, is Milton Kim, the US-trained 35-year-old boss of SsangYong Securities, part of the SsangYong chaebol. Both Kims are part of the new generation of Koreans seeking to take their country into the 21st century. “I think Korea is going to emerge stronger from this crisis,” says Michael Kim.
Michael Kim went to the US when he was only 13 years old and is a self-avowed sports fanatic. His special love is basketball, which he plays every Friday night in Seoul in an amateur league – a form of relaxation he will miss when he relocates to Hong Kong where no comparable league exists. He loves the New York Knicks and laughs that he would give an arm to play in just one NBA game. He also tries to play squash at least twice a week, no matter how bad his schedule.
He says he never had any intention of going into finance as a youth. Originally he wanted to be a journalist, editing his high-school newspaper, The Crusader. He spent most of his university years reading novels and says he didn’t even know what an investment bank was until all of his friends started applying for jobs at them.
He decided to have a go too, and was hired by Goldman Sachs. He was immediately thrown into the mid-1980s M&A boom where every banker was a master of the universe or a barbarian at the gate. He soon became addicted, and later got an MBA from Harvard. In the early 1990s he was moved to Hong Kong to cover Korea, and in 1995 joined Salomon as its chief representative in Seoul.
Kim retains his love for the arts, however, and unlike most bankers doesn’t translate his speed-reading of prospectuses into the way he reads novels. He reckons that defeats the object of reading them. He says he reads every night – a habit drilled into him in his teens by his father, who believed it was a cheaper way of improving his son’s English than hiring a private tutor.
“No matter how tired I am, I have always read before I go to sleep,” he says. “Although I have to admit things have been so frenetic in the last couple of weeks that I haven’t picked up a book once. That’s something I really hope won’t continue.” Steven Irvine
