Managing changes through financial engineering and flexibility

Patrick Yeung Kai-cheung, chairman and founder of Asian Capital Holdings, believes that success in the business world all boils down to people, specifically their integrity and abilities. The accountant-turned-corporate doctor, whose record includes helping 29 locally listed companies resume trading after financial restructuring, also thinks many business owners focus too narrowly on their own concerns and seem to forget what is happening in the wider world until it is too late.

Yeung will be a speaker at the CIMA/HKU Space joint forum on “Managing Changes in Corporate Financial Re-engineering” on 10 May, along with Edinburgh Business School Forum Professor Douglas McCulloch, who will lecture on “Evaluating Priority in Change Management at Work”. 

Yeung likes to use his own company to illustrate the axiom that change is the only constant in business” and to show how the financial re-engineering process can lead to long-term development and growth. 

Founded in 1998, Asian Capital Holdings was listed on the Growth Enterprise Market in 2010. It specialises in providing corporate advisory, underwriting and proprietary trading for small-cap companies.

“Our business is financial engineering, or to help others to do financial engineering,” says Yeung. “And just like other businesses, we operate according to the resources we have.”

Asian Capital is a typical example of how an enterprise can raise funds through listing. Before 2010, it had shareholder funds of only HK$10 million, but the total jumped to HK$130 million, thanks mainly to the HK$60 million raised through the initial public offering and a later HK$24 million placement. This, of course, has made it easier for the company to get through a period of uneven annual profits over the last five years.

Before becoming a corporate doctor, Yeung had a varied career, starting with in an accounting firm which helped restructure the debt for a jewellery business, going on to eight years at Standard Chartered Bank, and then running a business the bank took over after default. Later, Yeung was credited with turning around Macau banking institution Delta Financial in 1996 and, as a recognised insolvency specialist, decided to return to debt restructuring and start his own company, Asian Capital, in 1998.