Hamilton Lane bolsters Asia team

Global asset manager Hamilton Lane has hired Mingchen Xia as a principal on its fund investment team, according to a company statement. Xia will be based in Hong Kong.

Prior to joining Hamilton Lane, Xia was a senior fund manager at Tokio Marine Asset Management, where he looked after the firm’s private equity portfolio globally. He has also worked at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities and Mizuho Securities.

At the same time, Hamilton Lane has added Yen Li as a vice president in its business development group. Li was previously in a marketing and client relations role at Oaktree Capital, and held positions at Morgan Stanley, Pacific World Asset Management and KPMG before that.

“We are delighted to welcome Mingchen and Yen Li to the Hamilton Lane team. Both bring years of experience in the Asian private equity markets and their deeply developed regional networks and market perspectives will add great depth to our existing presence in the region,” Erik Hirsch, chief investment officer at Hamilton Lane, said in a statement.

Hamilton Lane expects a “record year” in Asia in 2014 in terms of deploying capital across funds, secondaries and co-investments, according to managing director and head of Asia at the firm Juan Delgado-Moreira.

“Our pipeline early in 2014 is quite focused on China, where we see continued reasonable valuations and a strong mid-long term macro outlook. We expect the activity to pick up pace and valuations to strengthen as the IPO market gains momentum,” he said in an email to Private Equity International.

“On a broader Asian basis, 2014 will also see a number of prominent managers coming back to market in Indonesia, India, Korea and Japan.”