Accountant to Everyone

 

Always motivated by fresh challenges, Anthony Chau has worked across industries – from CPA firms and a construction company to a biotech innovator and many more in between 

 

Audit achievements

 

Anthony Chau – who, among several other roles, is currently the chief financial officer of a healthcare technology company – has had a varied career, working in numerous industries. It has all been built upon an extended period at a CPA firm – and the QP studies that went with it.
Before embarking on his career, Chau studied accounting and finance at the University of Technology, Sydney. He had earlier decided he would like to go to university in Australia after a school friend and his family moved there.

“My favourite subject was economics,” he says. “Yet I chose accounting because I like numbers. At that moment I dreamt of becoming an accountant, though I had no idea what a CPA was. I studied for the subject at university, and I discovered that I loved it.”

After graduating, Chau worked for six months in Sydney as an accounting clerk for logistics giant UPS before returning to Hong Kong for family reasons. He then became an auditor with a medium-sized local CPA firm W M Sum & Co., joining in 1998 and continuing working there until 2014. Chau dealt with a wide range of listed clients, both local and international, while the job also provided him with an invaluable first taste of mainland China exposure. One such client, was Singapore automotive instruments company Juken Technology, after it acquired a majority stake in Micro-Air (Tianjin) Technology, spending three months in Tianjin in 2008 to oversee the process.

“It was the first time I had exposure to auditing in Mainland China,” he says. “There were not many overseas audit firms there then. I discovered a lot of things I hadn’t faced before; while I had learned accounting concepts in Hong Kong and Australia, the applications were completely different in China. For a start, I had to speak in Mandarin rather than English, taxation was so much more complicated, and business communication was very different, particularly with state-owned enterprises.”

Although he started his first job in 1997, Chau only obtained his professional qualification in 2010. The QP, he says, was the natural choice for those working in Hong Kong, although it took him a while to realize that. At first, he studied for the CPA Australia (formerly ASCPA) qualification, before realizing that QP was more relevant to his career at the time. Chau subsequently qualified as a member of the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand in 2021 as well.

“The QP syllabus was definitely useful to my work in the audit firm,” he says. “I still remember how the partners were always asking me about new updates to the accounting standards.”
 

IPO interests

 

The qualification opened the door to new opportunities in Chau’s career. He moved to a property company with a Mainland background, originally one of the clients at the CPA firm he worked at, and became its financial controller. The company was Hong Kong-owned with a Mainland subsidiary, which allowed him to gain significant hands-on experience about the business landscape in the Mainland.

“I was applying the same skills in a very different sector,” Chau says. “As an auditor, you look at historical data and make recommendations. Once you become the client, you need to take action as soon as you notice any issue.”

He moved again 18 months later, to a biotech company Wide Strong Resources, also as the financial controller of the group. There, he had the opportunity to work on an IPO for the first time in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

“I like trying new things and taking on challenges. When I was doing the IPO, I knew the main direction but there were a lot of small issues that I needed to resolve immediately. I was the only one to handle them, so I had to work out the solutions on my own,” Chau recalls. “You need to be able to solve problems.”

After three years at the company, he moved on to become the financial controller of the construction company Dao Kee, where he was again involved in an IPO. Indeed, Chau was recruited because of his previous experience of the complex process. This time the flotation was on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; fortunately, he says, his previous experience was still relevant, as many of the IPO procedures followed by Mainland Chinese exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen were originally based on those used in Hong Kong.

The QP equips individuals with essential knowledge and skills to prepare them for their careers. In today’s intricate and dynamic commercial landscape, marked by its complexity and numerous challenges, the knowledge, skills, and experience obtained become indispensable tools for addressing issues regardless of the industry. Exemplified by Chau’s quote, “you need to be able to solve problems,” and the QP training facilitates that. 

In addition to his work, Chau has been involved in the Institute’s Rich Kid, Poor Kid financial management project since 2016, regularly visiting schools to share his experience with teenagers. He says, while he is there to talk about his experience, he also learns valuable lessons from the younger generation.

“Their way of thinking could be totally different from mine, and I need to keep myself refreshed,” he expresses. “Every time I engage with them, it takes me back to my past.”

 

 

 

Interview and reporting by Richard Lord