Huang Chi-yuan, cross-strait private equity guru

Huang Chi-yuan is a practised multitasker. He has to be, in his position as chairman of the Taipei-based boutique merchant bank First China Capital Partners and also of the Taiwan Mergers and Acquisitions and Private Equity Council.

"You're just like an inspector," said Huang, 52. "You can't be too shy about doing due diligence. That's how investors in the United States got burned."

Educated at Stanford University in California, Huang has worked in investment banking for 25 years, including a stint in the 1980s for JP Morgan in New York. Today he has a particularly attractive view from his office in Taiwan, a growing economy that is steadily opening to mainland China, where the growth is even higher.

Huang, Taiwanese himself, says he excels in deals for China-based firms with Taiwanese leaders because their management was watertight. "It is my broad experiences in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that give me a unique sense and capability of putting cross-strait deals together," he says.

He can talk for an hour about the deals he has been involved in. Two years ago, for example, he brokered a US$300 million sale of the mainland-based, Taiwanese-owned Golden Jaguar buffet restaurant chain to the British private equity fund Apax Partners. After advising the mainland tea distributor Tenfu for a decade, Huang's company showed it the way to a US$182 million listing in Hong Kong and to the American private equity investor General Atlantic, which committed to buying 40 per cent of the IPO. In 2012, Huang led the Taiwanese-owned cosmetics packaging manufacturer Hsin Chung Plastics to a US$500 million buyout by another American private equity firm, TPG Capital.

Huang's company closed the cross-strait deals after disappointing experiences with clients that he discovered were already dealing with other parties. Those clients would take his ideas back to the original investor to try to get more out of an earlier deal.

"It's like being used, or being leveraged," said Huang, who works 12 to 13 hours a day, and once toyed with the idea of directing films instead of investing. "People shop around. People use me to do more work to bid up their price. Maybe I introduce several investors, but they have probably already cut a deal. The company will say, 'No, no, no, you are exclusive.' But this is minor, compared to fabricating your accounts," he smiled.