Goldman Sachs taps ex-Morgan Stanley MD as Korea co-head

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said on Monday that it has appointed Ahn Jae-hoon, former managing director at Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC as country co-head and the investment banking business chief in South Korea.

Ahn, who was most recently SK Bioscience Co.'s head of strategic planning and corporate development, will join Goldman Sachs' Seoul office as a managing director in mid-August.

He will oversee Goldman Sachs’ investment banking strategies and client management, as well as lead the overall businesses of the Seoul bureau with Managing Director and fixed income, currency and commodities (FICC) head Choi Jae-joon, who became a country head in April.

Ahn served as strategic planning head at SK Bioscience, a biopharmaceutical unit of Korea’s No. 2 conglomerate SK Group, for around three years from 2021. He spent more than a decade at Morgan Stanley from 2011 and was responsible for investment banking at Merrill for more than two years from 2008.

He studied business administration at Yonsei University in Korea and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008.

Goldman Sachs is a leader in Korea's merger and acquisition and initial public offering scene. In April, it advised Asian private equity firm MBK Partners in the $1.4 billion acquisition of Geo-Young Corp., Korea’s largest wholesale distributor of drug products, from Blackstone Inc.

In June, Goldman Sachs led the $365 million Nasdaq IPO of Webtoon Entertainment Inc., a digital novel subsidiary of Korean web service giant Naver Corp.’s digital novel subsidiary.

Goldman Sachs has been providing a range of financial services to Korean corporations and institutions since the 1970s. It launched the Seoul office in 1992, which was promoted to an affiliate that provides comprehensive financial services in 1998. Since 1999, the bank has invested more than $4.7 billion in the country.