Affinity's CJ Lee to become 3rd Korean executive to leave
Jun-Ho Cha and Ji-Eun Ha
Aug 04, 2023 (Gmt+09:00)
Affinity Equity Partners’ founding member and Managing Partner Lee Chul-joo (CJ Lee) will resign from the Asia’s leading buyout manager, according to sources familiar with the matter on Friday. The firm is set to build a new management team for its South Korean business as his resignation will follow former Chairman Park Young-taeg and ex-head of Seoul office Sam Lee’s leaving earlier this year, banking sources say.
CJ Lee has submitted a resignation letter to Affinity and will step down from outside director positions at portfolio companies like Kyobo Life Insurance Co., sources said on Aug. 4. He will take a position as a vice head at Seoul-based cloud service provider Bespin Global, where his elder brother Lee Han-joo is a co-founder and the chief executive.
Affinity’s Seoul office will be led by Partner Min Byung-chul (Charles Min) and will hire senior employees, sources said.
CJ Lee is a veteran of UBS Capital Asia, which spun out in 2004 to become Affinity. Before joining UBS, he served as a private equity investor at J. H. Whitney & Co. and was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Born in 1973, he holds a bachelor's from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Lee has become a star of the private equity industry over the past decade with major deals. He led Affinity and PE behemoth KKR & Co.’s sale of Korea’s Oriental Brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev at $5.8 billion in 2014. In 2016, his team successfully sold Korea’s music label Loen Entertainment, which later became Kakao M, to mobile platform giant Kakao Corp. at 1.9 trillion won ($1.4 billion).
Although the reasons behind Lee’s departure are not disclosed, market insiders say it is due to Affinity’s weak earnings.