AXA Private Equity announced this week the opening of its first China office in the country’s capital, Beijing. This continues the firm’s expansion in Asia having opened its first office in Singapore in 2005.
It has since deployed USD1.3billion of capital across the region. AXA Private Equity said the Beijing office would allow it to strengthen relationships with “key private equity market players”. It sees attractive partnership opportunities between Chinese and European companies, and, by leveraging its global reach and diverse European portfolio, AXA Private Equity intends to play a key role in enhancing these potential synergies.
Hedge fund veteran Julian Robertson is to seed a new investment partnership that will focus its strategy on Asian equities reported Bloomberg this week. Tiger Pacific Capital LP will be headed up by Run Ye, Junji Takegami and Hoyon Hwang, all of whom were senior members of Tiger Asia Management LLC, Bill Hwang’s New York-based hedge fund which shuttered earlier this year. It’s not clear how much seed money is being allocated. Former Tiger Management portfolio managers and analysts who have gone solo to set up their own firms are referred to as “Tiger Cubs” and include the likes of Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global and Viking Global Investors, one of the most successful firms established by Andreas Halvorsen. Earlier this year Adam Leitzes, who helped assess investments for Tiger Management out of Shanghai, established Karst Peak Capital Ltd in Hong Kong.
Tokyo hedge fund Japan Advisory has been hit with a second penalty for insider trading with Japan’s securities watchdog recommending a USD1,500 fine reported Reuters. The firm is believed to have traded on information gleaned from a research report produced by Nomura Holdings Inc, specifically with respect to a planned fundraising exercise by chipmaker Elpida Memory in July 2011.
US pension funds are some of the most aggressive in terms of allocating new capital to global macro strategies, and preference seems to be for home-grown macro managers in Asia reported AsianInvestor this week. Kier Boley, head of equity hedge investments for GAM’s multi-manager business, said that the reason people like them “has been that one of the legs of their trade will be in the region”, noting that some managers had done well through China exposure. Boley said that local managers had been able to capture interest rate movements quicker than, say, US-based macro managers. “In short, local Asian managers have caught the rate-cut trend earlier than others,” Boley was quoted as saying.