After graduating from Tsinghua, he entered China’s private equity industry, first joining GIC-backed CDH Investments from 2010 to 2016, before moving to Hillhouse Capital from 2016 to 2017, where he reported directly to founder and well-known investor Zhang Lei.
In 2017, Hamm joined HOPU Investments, a private equity firm founded by his father-in-law, Fang Fenglei, former chair of Goldman Sachs Gaohua Securities. Fang remains chair of HOPU Investments, while Anna Fang, Hamm’s wife, is a venture capitalist who has backed Chinese companies such as Xiaohongshu through ZhenFund, an early-stage venture capital firm.
Spending nearly two decades in China and Asia has clearly deepened his understanding of the region. Fluent in Mandarin, Hamm told The Edge Singapore that it is the depth of one’s networks and relationships that determines whether one thrives in Asia. That was one of the key lessons he took from moving East.
“The best private equity firms in Asia are going to be Asian. So, you do need to be local. You do need to have deep relationships here. You do need to understand how the market can be different here. There is a lot of it where you build that trust over, I want to say years, but really decades or more, with people,” says Hamm.
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“That is something that really can help you to create investment opportunities and to deal with things when the going gets tough. Having a deep relationship, in a way, is even more important [in Asia] than it might be in the West.”
While the war in Iran has sent an energy shock across the globe, some countries in Asia have positioned themselves as a safe haven for capital. In a report published by HSBC on March 31 titled Looking beyond the uncertainty, HSBC’s head of Asia equity strategy, Herald van der Linde and his analysts, Prerna Garg, Adam Qi and Varun Pai, maintained their overweight rating for mainland China and Hong Kong, while raising their ratings for Singapore and Taiwan to overweight and neutral, respectively.
“In the near term, we see heightened volatility across the region, but this is not a structural derailment of the growth story in Asia,” says van der Linde and his colleagues.
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Hamm is equally optimistic about the region’s prospects. He believes Asian markets and businesses have now reached the same level of maturity as their Western counterparts.
From a private equity investor’s perspective, this means that the time is now ripe to look out for buyout opportunities in the region. “One thing that we are going to see over the next few years is that this market is going to start to look more like the rest of the world. For the last 20 years, it really has been more of a growth market. It is going to become more of a buyout market,” adds Hamm.
“So, all the things you can do in the West: Buy cool companies, significantly improve them, have lots of different multiple paths to exit, whether that’s through dividend, trade sale or carve-out or all of these different things that we have seen for the last 40 years in US, we are going to start seeing them here.”
The Asian region, Hamm says, is headed toward what he calls its own “golden era” of buyout opportunities. This “golden wave” has already been playing out in Japan for the last 10 years and will start to drive returns across the wider region as well, he adds.
“That is really exciting if you sit in our seat,” Hamm says. “The first time a company gets bought by private equity. Oftentimes, that is when the highest returns are created.”
On the hunt for value
In its approach, HOPU Investments favours large-scale, proprietary, control-oriented investments, including orchestrating buyouts, carve-outs and take-private deals. One notable deal came in 2018, when HOPU Investments was part of a consortium that took private logistics group GLP for more than $16 billion, or $3.38 a share, then Singapore’s largest M&A deal.
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“That kind of transaction, where you combine a great company, great management team and a buyout opportunity, is really the type of thing that we like to focus on,” Hamm says of the GLP deal.
Aside from control-oriented deals, HOPU Investments does make structured investments into companies where they act as a solutions provider for them. The dual approaches have seen the firm build up a portfolio that includes technology companies like Arm China, consumer companies like the French animal health firm Ceva Animal Health, as well as Asian life insurer FWD Group.
Beyond capital, HOPU Investments draws on its regional expertise to drive value across its portfolio. The firm, for instance, played a key role in Ceva Animal Health’s expansion into China, Hamm says.
“Before we invested, they had a very small presence in China,” Hamm says of Ceva Animal Health. “What we did was we sourced for them two majority-controlled acquisitions in the animal health space in China. Those were the first two ever foreign-controlled subsidiary acquisitions in Chinese history. We did that.”
“We built their China management team. We introduced them to almost all of their core customers in China, and we helped them with approvals of vaccines,” Hamm continues, adding that Ceva Animal Health’s revenue tripled in a very short period of time with HOPU Investments’ support.
One common misconception is that HOPU is China-focused. That is not the case, says Hamm. “We have always had this international capability-local expertise kind of a viewpoint, even going back to our work with Goldman Sachs China,” he adds. “Our favourite type of company is a company that sits across Asia, that has revenue across the broader region, Southeast Asia, Japan, China and places like that. That’s true of FWD Group. It’s true of GLP. It’s true of the others.”
For instance, just over half the underlying revenue of companies in HOPU Investments’ Fund III comes from outside China, with the rest generated within the country. Hamm says the firm’s flagship investments, such as Ceva Animal Health, FWD Group and GLP, are global companies with revenues spread out across geographies beyond China. Even Arm China has a global aspect to its business by virtue of its relationship with the UK-based Arm.
“What’s nice about a company like that is that it has diversified revenue. There are going to be times when the market is growing fastest in Japan. There are going to be times when the market is growing fastest in Southeast Asia. There are going to be times when the market is growing fastest in China, and having an individual company that can rebalance its growth allows it to continue to grow very well.”
Playing across Asia not only provides diversification in terms of returns, but also in exit opportunities as well. “It allows us to drive exits and monetisation on a more regular basis,” Hamm adds. “One of the realities of Asia is that the exit windows open and close in different parts of Asia at different times.”
Riding the localisation wave
According to Hamm, the number of private equity players in Asia has fallen in recent years, creating an opportunity for veteran firms like HOPU Investments. “Right now, there are more opportunities than there is capital, which leads to attractive prices for an investor like ourselves.”
“Ultimately, what we do is we do three things. We source investments, we operate companies, and we exit those investments. In terms of sourcing, we have one of the deepest networks across the region,” he adds, citing the long-standing relationships that the firm’s founder, Fang, has cultivated over decades.
One trend the firm has been benefiting from is the wave of localisation sweeping through companies. Those with sizeable operations in Asia or China are increasingly looking to localise and turning to firms like HOPU Investments for guidance.
“Ten years ago, this was something that would happen occasionally. Now, I think almost every CEO globally is thinking about it,” Hamm says. “The good thing about these kinds of investments and transactions is that they are win-win for both sides. ‘I’m a CEO. I want to maintain my exposure to my Asian markets, and yet I also want to localise and have the best of both worlds.’ We can do that.”
HOPU Investments’ work on Arm China is one such example. Hamm says the firm helped install a new CEO, Feng Chen, a former Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation executive, while also seconding its own COO to run operations inside the company.
“Since we did that, it has grown phenomenally. That’s a combination of a great company, recruiting a great CEO, but then really giving all of our resources to that CEO to enable him to be successful, even down to taking our COO and putting her in the company full-time to help him drive that operational change,” Hamm says.
Family-owned businesses are attractive
For most retail investors, family-owned businesses are not the most attractive companies to look at due to their opacity and tightly held nature. Hamm, however, believes that family-held businesses present a huge opportunity for HOPU Investments.
“Across Asia, you have great businesses with strong market reputations and strong market presence, but maybe they have been run by a single person for 25 years,” Hamm says.
“Yet as the company evolves, there may be an opportunity for somebody like ourselves, where we have deep operating capability built over dozens and dozens of companies, and we can come in and take that company and introduce a full layer of very professionalised management team to it, COOs, CROs, CFOs and all of those different things.”
Private equity is not financial engineering
Private equity does not enjoy the cleanest reputation. Critics argue that founders and operators are better off relying on their own hard-won expertise than on firms that may not grasp the nuances of their industry. That view, Hamm says, understates the value firms like HOPU Investments can bring.
“Candidly, 90% of what companies deal with is universal,” Hamm says. “10% is very unique, but 90% of the issues that they face are operational issues where, having been involved with close to 100 companies, you have seen it before.”
“A founder knows their company better than anybody, but a fund like ours knows the industry and the operating challenges that companies face in a very deep manner from having been involved with many companies during their most important moments.”
“That’s something where we can bring our own people and resources to help a company grow faster and have bigger dreams.”
