PAG Chair to Share How a US PE Firm Bought Control of a Chinese Bank at HK Forum

PAG executive chairman and co-founder Weijian Shan will appear in a spotlight interview at the Mingtiandi Hong Kong Focus Forum on 27 June. Tickets to the event are available via the Register link below while supplies last.

Since China reopened to investment from beyond its borders more than 40 years ago, there has been only one case of a foreign company acquiring control of a mainland bank, and the architect of that transaction will be sharing his story at the Mingtiandi Hong Kong Focus on 27 June.

Having recently published his third book, Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China, Weijian Shan, chairman and co-founder of Hong Kong’s PAG will appear in a one-on-one interview with Mingtiandi’s Michael Cole at the gathering, which is expected to attract more than 250 real estate investment executives from around the region and globally.

In the interview, Shan will share the story of how, together with his team at Newbridge Capital (now part of TPG), he led the American private equity firm in buying a controlling stake in Shenzhen Development Bank from entities belonging to the city government and turned around the failing state-run financial institution.

Since joining PAG in 2010, Shan has helped build the pan-Asian private equity player into a multi-sector investor managing real assets, private equity and credit strategies with over $50 billion in assets under management.

Turnaround Artist

For Shan, who spent his teenage years doing hard labour in the Gobi desert during China’s Cultural Revolution, fixing up and later selling the national-level bank to Ping An Insurance Group was just one in a series of successful turnarounds.

After returning to Beijing from Inner Mongolia in 1975, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Shan went on to earn an MBA from the University of San Francisco, followed by MA and PhD degrees at the University of California at Berkeley.

After a stint at the World Bank, Shan taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, before joining JP Morgan in 1993, where he later was promoted to a managing director role.

Moving into private equity at Newbridge in 1998, Shan led a series of groundbreaking investments in Asia, including the buyout of Korea First Bank in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis.

Shenzhen Surprises

In telling the story of TPG’s buyout of Shenzhen Development Bank, Shan recounts the exhilaration and anxieties familiar to many investors active in mainland China during the country’s boom years, including struggles with vacillating local officials, opaque processes and murky financial statements.

For the interview at the Mingtiandi forum, Shan will be asked to share more details about the bank buyout, as well as filling in the audience on his earlier books, including Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, which tracks his life journey through some of China’s most tumultuous decades.

Under Shan’s leadership, PAG has been one of Asia’s most active real estate investors, operating both a core-plus/value-add and an opportunistic strategy.

In January this year PAG teamed up with Singapore’s Mapletree Investments to buy Hong Kong’s Goldin Financial Global Centre for $713 million and in December the firm’s Flow Digital Infrastructure venture broke ground on a data centre in the Philippines.

Shan will be one of a number of industry leaders speaking at Mingtiandi’s Hong Kong Focus Forum, with Warburg Pincus managing director Ellen Ng also appearing in a spotlight interview.

Other speakers at at the event include George Hongchoy of Link REIT, Graeme Torre of APG and Francis Li of Cushman & Wakefield. The Mingtiandi Hong Kong Focus Forum is sponsored by Yardi.