Oaktree made some very bad hiring decisions during the early days it started here in Asia. The teams in HK, Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore made a series of bad investments. Particularly in HK PE team, the performance was so bad that the HQ people lost all confidence in the team. What is left for us who joined later is a legacy portfolio consisting of bad performing companies. Our daily job is to manage them and try to exit. The problem is, there is not much to be done. We have very few companies and maybe only one of them is worth managing. And as a financial sponsor you don't do the actual operations at the company. So all we do is monitoring. And that takes maybe 20 minutes a day on average. On new investment side, all the deals we sourced need to be sent to LA. And because I mentioned earlier that they have lost all confidence in the team here, all the deals were met with deaf ears. In the past 5-6 years, the team here did zero deal. For some of the MDs here that is fine. They are already MD meaning they have arrived at the end of their career. They are settled with such great lifestyle (20 mins of work per day and can take vacation or do personal things any day at any time). So intead of traveling / going to meetings and trying to make something happen, they just sit in the office every day and chill. Good for them. But for us junior employees, you know you will not find another job if you go by years without any deal experience. The model is not sustainable. Eventually the LA people will cut this team and you are left with nothing as you just wasted years of your life while your peers are so far ahead of you that you may never catch up again in a fast moving world like this.
I admit I sound like a disgruntled former employee. But think about this, if I was paid a lot of money, and lived a great lifestyle (too good) and yet I am still so bitter on the internet, it says something about the Oaktree's HK office. As a matter of fact, the PE team in Asia lost 90% of the investment professional over the past few years. That says something.