Cambridge to lift Asian presence with Beijing office

Cambridge Associates, the US-based asset consultancy, is to open a Beijing office – its third office in the Asia Pacific region – and is sending a private equity specialist there from London.

The Beijing office, to be run by UK managing director Christopher Hunter from the middle of next year, supplements the established Singapore and Sydney offices.

Sandra Urie

Sandra Urie (pictured), Cambridge’s chief executive, intends to spend about four months in the first half of next year working out of the Singapore office to help establish the China presence.

She said: “We are serving a growing group of Asia-based clients including endowments, sovereign wealth funds, government funds, family offices and other institutional investors. Another strong on-the-ground presence in the region will not only help us anticipate and serve our Chinese clients’ needs but is also key to the evolution of our research and due diligence activities on behalf of all our clients around the world.”

Cambridge, which is particularly strong in research of alternative asset classes and which has a big share of the endowments advisory market, has recently produced several papers on topics such as Chinese private equity, Asian hedge funds and distressed investing in Asia.

Sponsored Content

Leave a Comment

Sort content by

CalPERS: a new framework of economy

CalPERS has adopted 10 preliminary investment principles following a board offsite in July, but a number of topics, including the role of active management, are still under debate ahead of the September board meeting that is the deadline for the principles’ adoption. The $266-billion Californian fund began the process for establishing investment principles in January

Social networks in the investment web

Reels of financial data and analysis coupled with the occasional piece of market gossip or personal hunch are the time-honoured tools investors rely on in building an active portfolio. More recently, an element of sustainability or corporate governance analysis has tried to muscle into the process. Soon there will be another revolutionary option complementing financial

Eijffinger’s decade of financial repression

Financial repression will define the economic landscape for at least another decade, according to professor of financial economics at Tilburg University, Sylvester Eijffinger, which has serious implications for institutional investors. Eijffinger, who also is also a visiting professor at Harvard, sits on the monetary experts panel of the European Union and is an adviser to

Is reviving Europe a suspended apparition?

Getting Europe’s swelling institutional capital to support long-term projects that could benefit its uninspired economies was an idea that sent heads nodding around the continent as it suffered the brunt of the financial crisis. Get pension, insurance and foundation money into where it is most needed with the attraction of reliable long-term cash flows and

Let’s talk about underfunding

Even using the assets of the pension plan was not enough of a leg-up to save the city of Detroit from bankruptcy. As the last words in the song Put your hands up for Detroit by Fedde Le Grand say, it is system shutdown. The fiscal demise of this city may be a lesson for

Johnson urges pension simplicity

There is a David-and-Goliath feeling to the battle Michael Johnson, a research fellow at the London-based think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, is waging against the pension industry. His research, which lays out the case for radically simplifying all aspects of the United Kingdom’s pension sector, has earned him a reputation as a maverick.

Previous