About

China International Capital Corporation (Hong Kong) is the offshore intermediate holding company for CICC, one of China’s leading investment banks. In his role as managing director and head of legal and compliance, Joe Jiaxing Zhou leads a team of 15 lawyers and two support staff at CICC (Hong Kong). ‘Along with CICC’s rise to being the dominant underwriter for overseas listings of Chinese businesses and a pre-eminent institutional investor in Asia Pacific, Zhou’s team has overseen and advised on numerous notable and cutting edge transactions on the sovereign, A-Share, H-Share, D-Share, interbank and currency markets’, says a nominator. The legal team is divided into several teams – the equity capital markets team, debt capital markets team, private equity team, secondary market team, investment management team and corporate team – to cover different business lines of CICC Hong Kong, with the legal head Zhou supervising each team’s work. Zhou also supervises the legal work of CICC Hong Kong’s overseas subsidiaries in Singapore, the UK and the US. Due to its significant growth and expansion in the past two years, CICC (Hong Kong) is participating in more complex transactions and providing in-depth services to its clients. To meet the increased volume of legal work, the legal team of CICC Hong Kong is also expanding significantly with more lawyers joining the team. In addition to traditionally providing its strong support in the primary market deals such as IPOs, bond offerings and financial advisory services, the legal team also plays a crucial role in other business lines such as secondary market, fund formation and private equity investment. By the end of 2018, the size of assets managed by CICC Hong Kong was ¥249bn and the legal team provided strong support in achieving that. Recently the team has been involved in a number of significant cases and transactions, including China Everbright Water’s dual primary listing in Hong Kong in May 2019. It was the first dual primary listing in the Hong Kong market in 2019 and the first company dual listed in Hong Kong and Singapore under China Everbright Group. CICC Hong Kong also acted as the leading joint sponsor, leading joint global coordinator and joint book runner as well as joint lead manager and settlement agent in the listing. The team also contributed largely to Opera Software’s US$115m listing on NASDAQ in July 2018, with an additional US$60m from a concurrent private placement. It was the first IPO in the US led by a Chinese underwriter, the first IPO of a global leading independent browser provider, and the largest Nordic tech IPO in the US capital market excluding telecommunications. CICC Hong Kong acted as the lead joint book runner for this offering and sole advisor of CPP. Talking about the team ethos, Zhou states: ‘It is our aim to achieve the right balance between legal and reputational risk and business development. It is also the most important and perhaps most difficult skill of an in-house legal counsel. Front desk colleagues want to get the deal done and grow the business while the legal department is the door keeper and legal risk manager. The job of the in-house lawyers is to help the firm achieve their commercial goal while making sure the firm does not take on inappropriate legal and reputational risk’.