Building China's top investment banking franchise: Do not become caught in ‘isms’— An interview with Ted Tokuchi

Abstract

Ted Tokuchi has a truly global background. The son of a Japanese trading house owner, he first went to China when he was just 11 years old. He lived there for the next 13 years, studied at both Peking and Stanford Universities, and held middle and senior management roles at Daiwa Securities in the U.S., Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore, and Japan. In 2002, Mr. Tokuchi signed on with CITIC Securities, a Chinese-based company. He joined CITIC Securities’ foundling investment banking division and helped develop it into the top investment banking department in China, rising to become the managing director of CITIC Securities Co. Ltd and chairman of CITIC Securities International, responsible for investment banking, marketing, and transacting of equities and bonds. Mr. Tokuchi is the first foreign senior manager employed by the Chinese securities industry, and is identified as a symbol of an age. He was awarded the Friendship Prize by the Chinese government in 2009, which is the highest accolade granted to foreign experts who work in China. Ted and I started these Executive Focus interviews in a Beijing hotpot restaurant last December (2012), and continued over a Skype call a month or so later. As is our custom when conversing, the interviews were conducted mostly in English, but when a concept was better explained using Chinese or Japanese, we shifted languages. A more technical discussion of political constraints on cross-border acquisitions in which one party is a Chinese firm appears in Section 2 of this special issue.