Dear Friends and Families,
I trust that this letter finds you well.
Company Update
We are pleased to announce that we have a new member to the House of Mulans. In April, we started our search of a new colleague in Singapore and reviewed 136 applicants. We spent the following 4 months to find the right person. It certainly took longer than we anticipated, but just like our due diligence process, it is important to spend enough time before the engagement. Equally importantly, it was a mutual process of selecting. For the new colleague, this is a completely new workplace and relationship. We tried to provide the information of our company as much as possible during the interview process, but the disclosure is limited as we are a family office. Through the process, we surely missed great candidates.
CHAN Yong officially started at Star Magnolia Capital’s Singapore office on July 31 and just completed his 3-month probation period. CHAN Yong keeps surprising us by his passion to learn and quality of analysis. Our lengthy due diligence process was proven correctly. During the first three months we published an intriguing and thought-provoking article written by him: “A Young Allocator’s Checklist of Psychological Biases”. By reading this article, you can tell the depth and skepticism of his thinking process, a quality we require to become a responsible allocator.
During the summer, we enjoyed working with Jessica MENG, our intern based in Singapore. She is back to Cornell University to continue her studies in hotel administration as well as to pursue her passion in music. She released her first two songs, Ghost Town and Ghost Town, Pt. 2 (Calling Your Name), in 2022 and 2023, inspired by her experiences during the Shanghai lockdown. Both songs are available on Spotify. More importantly, she just released her third one, Everybody’s Perfect Daughter, on Nov 10. You can find her new song on Spotify. Please check it out.
We are still looking for a junior person (0-2 years experiences) to join our research team. The location is flexible, either Singapore or Shanghai. If you know any potential candidate, please let us know.
Research Activity Updates
We had another busy quarter. We approved a new investment manager based in the United States. This investment manager seeks control positions in small but high quality knowledge-based companies. We met the investment manager late 2022 and completed our due diligence this summer.
We conducted 186 Due Diligence Activities during the quarter, including 143 Meetings & Calls, 31 Sourcing and 12 Reference. This brings the total number of Due Diligence Activities to 563 this year.
Due Diligence Activities
By Type
During September, we organized the first research trip in China with a few families. We visited Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai over 8 days, met 20 investment managers and companies and participate in 2 AGMs. It was the first time for some families to visit China since COVID and truly an eye-opening experiences. We plan another trip in January or February.
Thank you very much for your support.
Yours respectfully,
Shinya Deguchi
I would love to meet CHAN Yong one day.