Profile: Longreach Group's Mark Chiba

Australian Mark Chiba was just 12 years old when he read US President Richard Nixon's autobiography. This fascination with politics led to a penchant for activism while at university. Born of Hungarian refugees - an accountant and entrepreneur father who invented papier-mâché pizza bases and a librarian mother who became a Fulbright Scholar - Chiba grew during difficult times for Australia, and he campaigned for change.

"It was a different world back then," he recalls. "It was moving to de-regulation of the economy and an overall free-market approach that saved Australia from economic decline. From 1983 to 2006, we had a very aggressive and courageous reform process, started by a Labor government and continued by the Liberal government, and I was very active in that in the late 1980s."

This passion for the health of the economy paved Chiba's entry into the world of finance. Having studied economics and law at the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, respectively, he arrived at Oxford University to study international relations just after the Berlin Wall came down and as the Cold War was ending.

Determined to have a role in the rapidly evolving world around him, Chiba set his sights on becoming an investment banker. He joined Crédit Suisse-First Boston in London in 1992 and got his first taste of Asia on the international capital markets desk, raising equity for the likes of Indian conglomerate Tata and Hong Kong property company Henderson Land.

"It was an exciting time because it was still pioneering, ground-breaking work," he says. "It wasn't a well-established global equity new issue market so we were working out deal structures and investor demand and how to make it all work as we went along."

Globetrotting

Three years later, duty called. Bill Gurry, who headed the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee that sent Chiba to Oxford, recruited him on behalf of SG Warburg & Co. to build up the business in Australia. Chiba returned, somewhat reluctantly, to his homeland, but he wasn't there for long. After Warburg was bought by Swiss Bank in 1995, he relocated to Hong Kong to set up a financial institutions group.

With the onset of the Asian financial crisis two years later, Chiba found himself catapulted into advising sovereign governments and local and foreign banks on complex recapitalizations and M&A transactions. "I was very young, 31, 32, and I was advising finance ministers and bank CEOs," he remembers. "It was a tremendously lucky and enriching professional experience."

Still to come, though, was Chiba's foray into the Japanese market, the geography with which he is most commonly associated today. Once again corporate M&A was the trigger: Swiss Bank merged with UBS and he was asked to relocate to Japan to help restructure and run the merged operations as the country CEO. "One of the reasons I was offered the job was because no-one else wanted it," he says. "Japan was perceived as too hard by many MDs in London and New York. It was in fact a huge opportunity for me."

Chiba - whose surname is curiously one of the most popular in Japan - simply saw their skepticism as an opportunity to differentiate himself. Nearly four years later, he came to be one of the only Westerners investing in the local market. By that point, investment banking had become "a global sausage machine" in which the old-style partnership arrangements and pride in one's craft were things of the past.

When the chance came up to move into private equity, Chiba sought to create a Japan-focused buyout firm with old-fashioned values, alongside his co-founder Masamichi Yoshizawa. From its inception, he says, Longreach Group - of which he is now group chairman and partner - fostered a genuine partnership culture and shied away from purely financial engineering.

Since founding Longreach, Chiba has moved back to Hong Kong, and operates his firm out of the very same building in which he worked for Warburg more than a decade-and-a-half ago. Being based in the offices of a firm he considered the epitome of a first-class, small-scale investor is a constant reminder of the boutique feel he wants for his own company.

As for Japan, Chiba has fond memories of the time he was resident there - especially the odd weekends when he could unwind as the locals do. "I love the Japanese ryokan (inns) where you can stay," he says. "You just wear your Japanese yukata for the weekend, have hot baths and good food and relax with time to think."
Relaxation is a luxury at present, though. Longreach is currently raising its second fund and held a first close on $125 million last April.

A public role

Several funds down the line, Chiba is adamant that his focus will be less on private equity and more on giving back. In his view, there should be three phases to a person's life: education, work and then public service. During this stage in his own life, he imagines working for an international agency or institution, and admits to being inspired by the template laid down by Christine Lagarde, who led law firm Baker & McKenzie before going into French politics and becoming head of the International Monetary Fund.

"Happiness in life is measured by the quality of your relationships and by what you give and not what you take," he says. "It's important for people who've had the benefit of good education, of an open international society, to do something to contribute, to try and make sure that open societies continue to develop."

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• North Asia
• People
• GPs
• Japan
• Mark Chiba
• The Longreach Group Limited