Greater China Dealmakers 2026

Charlton advises on takeovers and listings, and she sits on the bodies that review them. The SFC's Takeovers and Mergers Panel listed her as a member on 31 March 2026, a seat she has held since 2005, and HKEX appointed her to its Listing Review Committee in 2020, after she served the maximum six-year term on the Listing Committee from 2012 to 2018. Hong Kong regulates its market through practitioners who also advise in it, and her seats are working appointments rather than honours.

She qualified in England and Wales in 1985 and has practised in Hong Kong since 1987, through partnerships at Stephenson Harwood & Lo, Simmons & Simmons and Ede Charlton, before establishing Charltons in 1998. Chambers ranks her in a category it calls Corporate/M&A: Independent Hong Kong Firms. In September 2026 Asian Legal Business named her Woman Lawyer of the Year at its Hong Kong awards.

Erik Ryd founded Hop Lun in Hong Kong in 1992 and built it into an intimate apparel manufacturer employing more than 30,000 people, with factories in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia and Indonesia, supplying global retailers. In 2022 he sold control to Platinum Equity and retained a significant stake. BDA Partners advised him alongside Goldman Sachs.

Cheung came to that work through accountancy, qualifying as a chartered accountant in Canada and working in transaction services at Ernst & Young and PwC in Hong Kong and Canada, before moving to M&A at TC Capital in Singapore. She joined BDA in 2012 covering Greater China and South East Asia, and now heads its consumer and retail practice. Earlier mandates include Navis Capital's KFC franchise in Hong Kong and Macau and its stake in the Hui Lau Shan dessert chain.

When a controlling shareholder offers to buy out everyone else, the minority shareholders need an opinion on whether the price is fair. Hong Kong requires that opinion to come from an adviser with nothing riding on the answer. Somerley has done that work since 1983, without a bank attached to it, and Chow runs the firm.

He joined in May 2006 from Haitong International Capital, formerly Taifook Capital, where he had spent more than six years and finished as a director. He became managing director of Somerley Capital in February 2010 and chairman of its Beijing arm in June 2018, then took over as chief executive of the listed holding company in March 2022, five years after Somerley itself listed. His own description of the role is supervising and leading execution of corporate finance projects, which means putting his name to the opinions independent shareholders vote on.

For three years from 2008, Ellis stopped advising investors and became one. As Asia chief legal officer at D. E. Shaw she worked on making, restructuring and exiting the fund's positions across China and India. She returned to private practice in 2011 and to Morrison Foerster in 2013, and led the buyer's team on Ascendent Capital Partners' US$1.66bn take-private of Hollysys Automation, which nearly 87 per cent of voting shareholders approved.

She has worked in Asia for more than 25 years. Her firm puts the value of transactions she advised on in the three years to 2024 at around US$250bn. She was in Hong Kong for the first wave of Chinese internet companies and the ownership structures built to admit foreign capital, a subject she has written about since. She leads Morrison Foerster's global private equity practice and sits on the firm's board.

HelperChoice was built in Hong Kong to connect foreign domestic workers with employers without the placement fees the International Labour Organisation has campaigned against. In 2019 the French home care platform Yoopies acquired the company outright. Slotine acted for the buyer, and the work included transferring the employment agency licence to a new nominated operator, without which the business stops trading on completion day.

She was admitted in Paris in 1998, in England and Wales in 2006 and in Hong Kong in 2013, and founded her firm in 2016. It is small, working mid-market: European buyers acquiring Hong Kong companies, and founders selling them. In 2019 she tied the practice to the French firm UGGC Avocats, and she qualified as a Hong Kong mediator in 2023.

Guotai Junan Securities and Haitong Securities announced their merger in September 2024 and completed it in March 2025. Six months is a short timetable for combining two brokerages each listed in both Shanghai and Hong Kong and both answering to the same Shanghai government.

Davis Polk and China Business Law Journal both describe it as the largest merger of its kind. So led the Davis Polk team for Guotai Junan. She was also on Hollysys, acting for the company being acquired.

Her earlier record includes the Uber China and Didi Chuxing merger in 2016 and Meituan's combination with Dianping the year before. She co-heads Davis Polk's practice across Asia outside Japan and leads its M&A and private equity work in the region. IFLR named her to its Women Dealmakers Hall of Fame in 2023. She studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale before Harvard Law.

In September 2025 Wang left Paul Hastings, where he had led the Beijing and Shanghai offices for more than 15 years, and joined Hogan Lovells in Shanghai. Eight months later he was leading the team advising Brookfield on World Freight Company, a Paris-founded business that sells and manages cargo capacity for more than 300 airlines across 80 countries. The transaction was worth about US$1.2bn and completed on 31 July 2026.

Lawyers in 15 offices worked on it, from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo to Munich, Madrid, Luxembourg and Mexico City. He has been based in Greater China since 2002, and his earlier mandates run through healthcare, entertainment and digital assets, including Fosun Pharmaceutical's sale of stakes in United Family Healthcare and Binance's purchase of CoinMarketCap. His firm took its current name in July 2026, when Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader completed their merger.