Faure moves to Citi

Citigroup has poached Adrian Faure from Macquarie Securities Asia to be its new head of Asian research. He will replace Otto Wong who left the firm last week. According to Wong, he is retiring from the industry in order to spend time with his young family and concentrate on competitive Ironman and triathlon races.

In the five years that he was running Citigroup's Asian research operations, the bank moved from 13 to third in the Institutional Investor rankings and increased its coverage from 17 analysts in three markets to 54 analysts in eight markets. He leaves Faure a good platform.

Faure's move to Citigroup adds another bank to the long list of institutions who have availed themselves of his services over the years. In the early 1990s, Faure ran Baring's Hong Kong and China research operation before moving to Merrill Lynch in 1994. He then moved with Merrill to New York to run the bank's Latin American research activities.

In 2001 he was lured back to Asia by ING to become the firm's head of research. In February 2004 he transferred across to Macquarie when the Australian bank bought ING's cash equity business.

Replacing him as head of Asian research at Macquarie in Hong Kong will be David Rickards. Rickards is the existing global head of research at Macquarie. He has been based in Hong Kong since Macquarie bought ING's equity business, overseeing the build up of the research operations. In essence there were thus two heads of Asian research and this probably contributed to Faure's decision to leave.

Separately Macquarie has announced a whole series of other research hires in recent days. In Japan, David Gibson has been moved to be deputy head of research from his position at Macquarie in New York.

In Hong Kong Bill Belchere has been hired from JPMorgan to be Asian economist. Also in Hong Kong Desh Peramunetilleke has been hired from Deutsche to cover micro strategy. Paul Quah and Sidney Yeh have both been hired from UBS to cover small cap stocks and Miriam Leung is covering property.

On the convertible side in Hong Kong, Roland Sharman has been hired to run the Asian convertible bond-trading desk.