Why the China rainmaker just won’t go away I The ins and outs of mandate hunting I
Lee Zhang: at the top of the Deutsche tree I Fang Fenglei and Fred Hu: one bank, two rainmakers I Zhang Liping and Janice Hu: quietly getting deals done
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A colleague at UBS refers to him as the "grandfather of the private sector in China", and the mainland banker spends more time pounding the pavements of Shanghai and Guangdong meeting entrepreneurs and company owners than cozying up to mandarins in Beijing. Yet until even two years ago, the 52-year-old Shanghainese-speaking banker would have been no one’s idea of a rainmaker.
That characterization was until recently reserved for such people as Merrill Lynch’s Erhfei Liu, Deutsche Bank’s Lee Zhang or the peripatetic Margaret Ren – bankers who could land roles on the big-ticket stock sales of state-owned enterprises such as China Telecom, PetroChina, and China Life Insurance, simply by turning up and shaking a few hands.
China has moved on since then. These days any foreign investment bank worth its salt is vying to position itself as a corporate financier to the country’s ambitious privately owned firms.
