The Hong Kong boutique that’s pretty much just Morgan Stanley
Ampere Partners, the four-year-old investment banking boutique, has scored a bit of a jackpot – it’s been selected to serve as financial advisor to Cainiao Smart Logistics Network, a 100-billion-yuan Alibaba subsidiary debuting on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Ampere has a lot of Morgan Stanley going on. Aside from its two-founding partners, both 22-year veterans of the bank when they left, all three of the boutique’s Managing Directors (MDs) spent serious time at Morgan Stanley before joining Ampere. As did its one VP.
The two founding partners, Daniel Wetstein and Crawford Jamieson, were both pretty big fish at Morgan Stanley. Wetstein was head of Taiwan investment banking, and Jamieson vice-chair of global capital markets (among a slew of other titles such as co-head of GCM in APAC and co-head of Equity Capital Markets in the region). Both, curiously, served as heads of technology investment banking in APAC at some point or another, too.
The three MDs – Huan Yu, Pin Chun Lin, and Charles Yeung – are ever so slightly different. Whilst Yu and Lin joined from Morgan Stanley directly, Yu was an MD in Shanghai, and Lin was an executive director in Hong Kong. Yeung, remarkably, joined from Amcor, the Swiss packaging company, where he was with the corporate development team. But breath a sigh of relief – he spent nine years with Morgan Stanley’s banking team in Hong Kong before that.
VP Randy Cheng also joined directly from Morgan Stanley’s Financial Institutions Group (FIG) team in the city. Interestingly, he started with the bank in Taiwan (formerly the realm of co-founder Daniel Westein). His two associates – Yanghao Lin and Xi Shen – are the only bankers who haven’t spent time at Morgan Stanley. Lin joined from TMT-focused boutique Delta Partners, whilst Shen joined from the TMT team at JPMorgan.
It's not clear whether Ampere will be hiring to reflect its windfall, but if it does it will presumably help to have one particular US institution on your CV.
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