CDP Receives Substantial Capital Investment

(27 October, 2016) CDP Group has announced a strategic partnership with Morgan Stanley in the group’s latest Globalization Summit. CDP’s Chairman Mr Wang Wei and Morgan Stanley’s Managing Director Mr Kingsley Chan jointly announced that Morgan Stanley will make a strategic investment in CDP through Morgan Private Equity Fund, an Asia private equity fund managed by the company.

The announcement of the milestone strategic partnership was witnessed by guests of the Summit, including business leaders from more than 300 established enterprises from China and overseas, 400-plus well-known management and HR leaders, and the top echelon of leading worldwide management consultant firm McKinsey & Company, authoritative IT research and consultation firm Gartner, market intelligence firm IDC, as well as world-leader in business solutions SAP.

The heavy-weight investment follows earlier funding supports from other corporate giants, among them China’s CBC Capital, Europe’s InvestorAB, Japan’s Sumitomo Group and the Fidelity Group from the US, and marks another milestone for CDP Group in 2016. It is also a strategic move by Morgan Stanley to venture into human capital management (HCM) after years of careful markets research and global economic trend analysis by the Morgan fund. The strategic move will add impetus to CDP’s development towards globalization and integration and speed up its overseas expansion to build a one-stop HCM ecosystem in the Asia Pacific region.

In his address at the summit, CDP Chairman Mr Wang said: “It is a great honor to have Morgan Stanley joining hands with CDP. 2016 is a crucial year for CDP. As a Chinese multi-national enterprise, CDP in striving for ‘globalization, diversification and integration’ has been pushing forward our strategic plans for globalization through relentlessly integrating resources from different fields.”

Sharing the group’s future direction, Mr Wang said that the funds from the strategic investment will be channeled into two areas: “Firstly, to expand the strategic planning for globalization, and accelerate overseas expansion through mergers and acquisitions, attracting talent, and cross-discipline collaboration. Secondly, to invest more heavily into research in technology, and to optimize our one-stop SaaS cloud-based business model in order to provide higher quality service to our clients.”

Recapping the group’s recent progress, Mr Wang said that CDP group as the industry’s game-changer and challenger for over a decade has been holding fast to the belief of “Enable the business of future, become the employer of choice” to engender a unique one-stop model for business and human capital management model, to empower globalized companies and the Chinese enterprises striving for globalization to enhance efficiency while lowering costs.”

Morgan Stanley’s Managing Director Mr Kingsley Chan said: “HCM is a sunrise industry showing stable growth. Investing in this field is a decision based on extensive internal and external research as well as business model analysis in the past few years. Looking at the global economic development as a whole, multi-nationals have been setting up branches in China, which they see as their biggest market. At the same time, globalization will be the key trend for Chinese companies in the next five to 10 years, and as such the need for cross-border HCM will see exponential growth. In making this strategic investment, we are convinced by CDP’s SaaS capabilities and its one-stop business model. In recent years, CDP has been racing ahead with compound growth in revenue that exceeds the industry average by two to three times. Its development model is increasingly mature, and is one of the best in the Asia Pacific HCM field. The group has built a solid clientele in the sectors of auto parts, healthcare, manufacturing, luxury goods, new energy and finance, and presents very promising development prospects. Morgan Stanley will leverage our international resources and experience to support CDP and its clients in their globalization quests. The strategic investment in CDP is a key step for Morgan Stanley Private Equity Fund in venturing into the HCM industry. We will continue to deepen our involvement in this sector and invest in other leaders in the HCM SaaS area.”

The monumental investment that stunned the HCM sector is a perfect marriage of the capital and the high-tech markets. CDP will pool together its strategic resources to help Morgan’s private equity fund to push on its advance in the HCM field, and in turn Morgan Stanley will use its powerful capital operation capabilities to propel CDP’s progress in “globalization, diversification and integration”.