Yang Liu was hounded by a headhunter for 12 months before she finally took the plunge and joined Atlantis Investment Management as managing director last year. She left a long-standing position as head of China investments with CMG First State, and had also been running a joint venture fund with Citic, the company that first employed her as a graduate.
'I moved from a state-owned enterprise kind of job to an entrepreneurship, which is quite a new platform for me,' she said. 'I used to work for big names but I felt I needed a change.'
Boutique fund house Atlantis, set up in 1995 by former Schroders fund managers, has US$900 million under management, mostly in the Japanese market. Ms Liu's job is to drive the company's China strategy and development.
'One of my ambitions is to manage two classes of assets,' she said. 'One class is for overseas money invested in China, which I have already achieved. The second is to help Chinese people make money out of the Chinese market. We are still in the development phase of that and it will take a few years.'
Her main task has been raising a portfolio for the Atlantis China Fund, which debuted on the Dublin exchange on March 20, a day before war broke out in Iraq. The fund has US$35 million under management and US$20 million more pledged from an investor in the US. Eighty per cent is from institutions, with the remainder from substantial clients, staff and shareholders - including some of her own cash.
Ms Liu saw a dramatic shift in sentiment towards investing in China in the three marketing trips to Europe and Australia before the fund launched. The first was in May last year, with markets in a post September 11 funk that extended into a long bear market. 'The first two trips the clients showed no willingness to invest in China. They were still in a dream about the recovery of their own markets. This year, people started to realise that they cannot wait for their markets to recover because maybe they never will - they could stay flat and boring for ages,' she said.