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Banking, Capital Markets, China, Featured Work, Hong Kong, Regional Asia - Apr 10, 2012 11:35 - 0 Comments

Reality bites: the truth about investment banking in Asia

Euromoney, April 2012Euromoneycoverapril12001

Asia is the future; that’s an article of faith in global investment banking. And there is no denying that Asia is where the growth economies are, the dynamic young populations, the most vibrant trends in trade and market development. But global bank HQs need to temper their expectations a little.

For all the promise of this region, investment bankers here face a host of challenges. Asian investment banking is unhealthily tilted towards equity capital markets, making it especially vulnerable to times – like the six months until early March – when those markets are closed. Within that, it’s far too focused on China, too. Competition from local houses is growing by the day; fees, already under pressure, are being sliced by an irksome trend of issuers putting as many as nine bookrunners on deals; and headcount costs are stubbornly high for good people at exactly the time that banks are being told by head office to slash bonuses.

See the article as it ran here: http://www.euromoney.com/Article/3005687/CurrentIssue/85141/Reality-bites-The-truth-about-investment-banking-in-Asia.html

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Big Interviews, China, Featured Work, Hong Kong, Middle East, Other, Science and engineering - Apr 10, 2012 10:47 - 0 Comments

Reach for the sky

Discovery Channel Magazine, April 2012Adrian Smith

In 1987 a young architecture student called Timothy Johnson, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, visited Chicago for the first time. He was overwhelmed by the mighty skyscrapers that rose, muscular, from the city floor – the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center – and was both delighted and deflated. On his way back to the Midwest farmland where the tallest buildings were grain silos and water towers, “I was quite depressed, thinking I was born a hundred years too late,” he recalls. “Wouldn’t it have been great to be in a city like Chicago at the turn of the century, when it was all being built – when the US itself was being built?”

Then he went to Asia. “And then I realized: no, I was born at exactly the right time.”

See the article as it ran here: DCM-SKYSCRAPERS

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Big Interviews, Economics, Featured Work, Foreign Exchange, From the Vault, Malaysia, Politics - Oct 1, 2007 9:52 - 0 Comments

Mahathir Mohamed, Emerging Markets, October 2007

With MahathirEmerging Markets, October 2007

Putrajaya is a curious place. Though few outside of Malaysia have heard of it, it is the country’s federal administrative centre, founded in 1995 to take the government departments out of nearby Kuala Lumpur. It’s a place of resplendent architectural daring: mosques, palaces, convention centres, and five extraordinary bridges over a 650-hectare man-made lake. But the most striking thing about it is this: there’s no-one there.

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