Carlyle hires ex-Kingsoft CEO as senior advisor
The Carlyle Group has appointed former Kingsoft CEO Hongjiang Zhang as a senior advisor to its Asian private equity business. The move is intended to deepen the firm’s coverage of the internet and technology space.
Zhang retired from Kingsoft in December 2016, having spent five years with the software and internet services company. Before that, he was chief technology officer of Microsoft’s Asia Pacific research and development group and a managing director of its advanced technology center. In this dual role, Zhang led Microsoft’s R&D agenda in China, from strategic planning to incubating new products and services.
Last year, he joined Source Code Capital as a venture partner and will continue to work there while acting as an advisor to Carlyle. The Chinese VC firm, which is currently deploying its third US dollar-denominated fund of $260 million, targets early-stage opportunities across the technology, media and telecom (TMT) sector.
Carlyle made its first later-stage investment in China’s internet space in 2014, backing online reading business China Literature and classifieds site Ganji. Both investments worked out well as Ganji merged with listed rival 58.com in 2015 and China Literature completed a $1.1 billion Hong Kong IPO last year.
X.D. Yang, managing director and Asia chairman of Carlyle, said in a statement that the firm planned to expand its TMT investment activity. This reflects a growing acceptance among larger private equity players that internet-enabled technology is too important to ignore. If GPs are not actively investing in the space, they are devoting more resources to studying how it might impact existing and potential portfolio companies.
Carlyle established a presence in Asia in 1998 and currently has $16.3 billion of assets under management in its Asian private equity platform. The firm is currently raising its latest regional buyout and growth funds. The former has a hard cap of $6.5 billion and reached a first close of $4.5 billion last October, while the latter has a target of $1 billion.
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