Milwaukee meets Shanghai

Investment banking boutique Robert W. Baird & Co. may be based in Milwaukee, but its reach goes beyond cheese, beer and the Green Bay Packers. The middle-market firm recently opened for business in Shanghai, where it hired Anthony Siu from Standard Chartered plc in Hong Kong.

Siu, who at Standard was a director of corporate advisory and focused on cross-border M&A deals in China, now splits his time between Baird's Hong Kong and Shanghai offices, where Baird Capital Asia Partners, the firm's private equity business, is based. He plans to relocate to Shanghai at the end of 2008 and expects to hire at least a half a dozen bankers for his team by the end of 2009.

"Our real strength is in cross-border M&A, and we believe that the two biggest opportunities are in China and India," says Dominick "Nick" Zarcone, Baird's chief operating officer of investment banking in Milwaukee.

While seven of the firm's 10 offices are in the U.S., including Atlanta, Tampa, Fla., and Palo Alto, Calif., roughly 30% of Baird's M&A business has been non-U.S.-based for the past five years. The firm has 30 bankers in London and Frankfurt.

Baird hired Executive Access Ltd., a Hong Kong-based search firm, to find a lead China dealmaker. It insisted on hiring an experienced investment banker with an existing China network. "Anthony brings the whole package," Zarcone says.

Siu is a Hong Kong native and, before Standard Chartered, worked on M&A and capital market transactions at Daiwa Securities SMBC Co. Ltd., Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Schroders plc. He went to Pomona College in Southern California and earned an executive M.B.A. at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a certified CPA in California.

Finding a native Chinese to fill the job was important to Baird, which started a private equity team in China in 2003. "We're going into a market where the investment banking side has never been," says Zarcone. "You can't do that by plunking New York- or even London-based bankers in Shanghai successfully."

Siu agrees. "China is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. We want to be closer to our clients," he says.