Uapa Hong Kong Style

Full disclosure: I wrote this on the airplane and haven't proof read yet, but just wanted to get it posted before I forget. Photos to come!

Now that I’ve travelled to Asia for the first time, I feel compelled that I should write about the experience and compare it to my other travels in Latin America and Europe. First of all, Hong Kong is Asia-lite. It was seriously like being in London, but everyone was Asian. There were double decker buses, people drove on the opposite side of the road, and everything was really well organized. Since Hong Kong was a British colony until 1997, it feels extremely British and everyone I interacted with spoke a good amount of English. I was also surprised how non out of place I felt. Even though I obviously look foreign, I didn’t feel foreign. Maybe this is a result of being in Mexico City last year where I always stood out as the gringo. I never would have thought before that I could live in Hong Kong, but it seemed like a perfectly great place to live just like a London or San Francisco. I also think that since I spent so much time in China town in San Francisco I was already somewhat introduced to the food and feel of an Asian city. When we went to order dim sum I knew what I wanted to order rather than feeling overwhelmed (except when someone ordered a full roast pigeon).

I was also struck by the expat community. In Mexico City I would see gringos occasionally depending on what neighborhood I was in. There were a ton of white people in Hong Kong that were clearly working there, probably in the finance sector. One of the neighborhoods called Lang Kai Fung was probably 50% white people. There must have been a large study abroad population as well because there were so many young Western people I couldn’t help but think to myself, what are you doing here? They were too young to be finance professionals.

Hong Kong is considered a Special Administrative Region, so it has some autonomy, including its own currency, but it is technically considered part of China. They speak Cantonese in Hong Kong, which is different from the Mandarin of mainland China. I didn’t have a chance to speak with locals, but watching two of my other group members who speak Mandarin interact, it seemed as if people in Hong Kong preferred English to Mandarin. It reminded me of Barcelona where they have an attitude about speaking Spanish sometimes because their language is Catalan. I guess English is considered neutral.

The competition I competed in was called the Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge and there were 10 teams from the following places: Johns Hopkins, USC, University of Virginia, Harvard, Kellogg, IESE Barcelona, LBS, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Bangalore. We spent the entire day Friday at the competition in the Morgan Stanley office in one of the tallest buildings in Hong Kong and it was extremely impressive and well done. I couldn’t tell if it was for security or part of Asian culture, but there was an unnecessary amount of staff on hand to show us where to go or to help us. When you would be walking down a hallway there would be a person standing every 10 yards or so with a big smile and pointing in the direction for you to go. It was a little too much for me. The office was also extremely nice and had a spectacular view of Hong Kong harbor.

We did our presentation in the morning and it went as smooth as possible and we finished with just 7 seconds before reaching our allotted 10 minutes. We stumbled some in the Q&A portion, but overall it felt like we did as well as we could have hoped. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the finals, but I think it wasn’t our pitch, it was more that the underlying idea is extremely complex and unfortunately still pretty expensive for farmers without subsidies from the government. The four teams that made it to the finals were the following:

1)      USC: Fund that would purchase land feared to be contaminated with landmines at a steep discount in Angola, will use drones to ensure that there are no landmines/ disable any existing landmines, and then sell land to farmers.

2)      Bangalore: Project to employ garbage pickers to sort garbage into recyclables and burnable waste. Would sell the recyclables and burn waste to generate electricity.

3)      University of Virginia: Would pay people who are HIV positive in Washington DC (where 2.25% of population has AIDS) to go to their check-ups and provide monetary incentives for them to take a virus repressor drug so that they cannot infect other individuals. Would receive money from city government for reduced health care cost from reduced transmission of the virus.

4)      IESE Barcelona: Standalone electricity generators that burn garbage that could be used in Africa where there is no electricity in small communities and by factories that experience unreliable electricity.

Presentations 1, 3, & 4 were great, but presentation 2 was a mess. I guess in India you are considered smart if you speak really fast and have lots and lots of information. In just 10 minutes, the India team presented approximately 50 slides and showed 20 graphs. I could barely understand what they were saying they were speaking so fast. When the presentation ended I felt stupid that I literally had no idea what the presentation was about, but then the first question from the judge was “so… what is your project?” In the end, the winner was the Angola landmine team and second place the University of Virginia AIDS team. Both those presentations were extremely clean and concise.

After the competition ended, everyone became a lot friendlier. We went out as a group on Friday night with the USC, Harvard, and IESE Barcelona teams and had dinner with the University of Virginia team on Saturday night. MBA students are definitely a lot more put together than a lot of my peers at SAIS so it was a nice glimpse of how my next year might be.

The other really cool aspect of the competition was the judges. I was a bit shocked by the level of the judges they invited. The CEO of Morgan Stanley China spoke to us and the judges included T. Rowe Price, head of Corporate Strategy for Asia for BlackRock, managing director of Morgan Stanley, and a variety of CEOs of smaller sustainable investing shops. Many of the judges came up to us afterwards said that they really like our idea and thought that we should continue to pursue it and even offered to put is in contact with people they know in the insurance space.

On Saturday we escaped the concrete jungle and took a ferry to Lamma Island, which was absolutely stunning. The geography of Hong Kong is like the Puget Sound, but tropical. Hong Kong is actually on an island and around that island are other smaller islands. On Lamma Island we were dropped off at a fishing village and we went on a 5 mile hike through lush forests and secluded beaches to a fishing village on the opposite side of the island. It was insane that just a 30 minute ferry from one of the most densely populated urban centers in the world, was this quaint island with rural farming and secluded beaches that seemed more like something you’d see in Thailand.

Overall, it has been an extremely pleasant trip and it’s going to be strange to come back to the reality of finals week at SAIS and work. It’s like an experience from the movie Inception where for 4 days I was randomly in this completely different world, and now I am awake again. Strangely, I haven’t been very jet lagged and have been getting very little sleep, however I am not as tired as I should be. I have a feeling this is going to catch up with me. It will be nice to be back home to see Sandra and have a normal life, but this was definitely an unforgettable experience. Mhmgoi!