Webb-site.com - 2018年10月30日
Good evening. It’s a real pleasure to be here at the University of Hong Kong, addressing future leaders in all walks of life.
I can confidently say that I have lived in Hong Kong longer than most of you, as most of you are under the age of 27. I arrived in 1991 as a 26-year-old investment banker. I worked all over Asia doing IPOs and mergers and acquisitions for 3 years, and then moved to work for a local tycoon as an in-house adviser for 4 years. In 1998, I retired and established Webb-site.com, a non-profit platform which I personally fund, to promote better corporate and economic governance. For perspective, that was the same year that a search engine called Google was launched.
Webb-site.com takes around half of my time. In the other half, I research and invest in Hong Kong-listed smaller companies, exploiting some of the market inefficiencies that come from bad corporate governance. For those of you studying economics, it is what
George Akerlof called the lemon problem. Think of me as an expert mechanic, walking around a second-hand car lot in which there are no warranties, and all of them are discounted for the risk of being lemons. Not only that, but as most listed companies have a controlling shareholder, I am getting into the back seat – so I must find well-maintained cars with good drivers.