User:Topni

Jiyoung G.Kim:

Personal: Jiyoung G. Kim was born and raised in South Korea. She moved to the U.S. with her family in 1985 and finished high school in Pittsburgh, PA. She graduated from Harvard University in 1992 with an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences.

Career: Kim is a founder and managing partner of Topni Capital, an investment management company specializing in Asian equity investments. Kim started in the investment management business in 1994 after graduating from Harvard with a degree in biochemistry and working briefly in the biotech industry. She began her investment management career at a buy-side firm, Fred Alger Management, analyzing healthcare and consumer stocks mostly domiciled in the U.S. and Europe. After her CFA charter in 1997, she started investing in the global technology sector and launched PIMCO’s global tech fund, Global Innovation, in 2000. She continued to run global tech funds until 2007. As a global technology investor, Kim followed Asia closely since 1997 as so much of product manufacturing in technology industry was already outsourced to Asia. In 2007, she shifted her focus from global equities to Asian equities by starting to work at JK Capital Management, a HK based hedge fund specializing in Asian equities. Kim subsequently launched the Royce Asia Pacific Fund (equity long/short) in 2009. The Topni Asia Pacific Century Fund employs the same investment strategy and risk management guidelines as in the Royce Asia Pacific Fund.

Topni Capital:

Topni Pacific Century Fund, L.P. (the Fund) seeks to maximize long term capital appreciation with lower than market volatility by investing in high quality stocks (i.e. low leverage, high ROIC) in Asia Pacific markets with appropriate hedges. The fund’s primary focus is on companies that are climbing up the value creation chain to offer high-value-add products or services. These companies differentiate themselves using intellectual property, trade secrets or the operational know-how rather than exploiting low cost labor or high commodity prices. Their business models are geared toward domestic consumption rather than exports and tend to have consistent ROIC, low leverage and growing free cash flow. The fund’s investment goal is to ferret out companies which are lesser known today, the proverbial “diamonds in the rough,” but are likely to be polished and shine in coming years as Asia’s consumption power and fiscal conditions continue to strengthen.