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Wai (Eddie) Leung,
Sung Hwan (Sean) Oh & team
Bank of America
Merrill Lynch
"Their views are fair and independent."
Leading the lineup for a fourth consecutive year is Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s eight-person squad co-captained by Hong Kong–based Wai (Eddie) Leung and newcomer Sung Hwan (Sean) Oh, who works out of Seoul. The analysts follow 30 stocks and believe that Internet businesses in Asia are “seeing a transition to mobile usage and fragmentation of user time across more applications,” Leung explains. “These trends have affected industry margins, as monetization trails usage and hence company investment.” In China the team is urging clients to consider online gaming companies rather than Internet advertising stocks, on the belief that the former have a better risk-reward profile. In South Korea just as content providers benefited from fixed-line broadband adoption’s reaching the saturation point, their mobile counterparts and platform operators “are poised to benefit from increasing smartphone penetration,” says Leung, 39. The researchers win praise for “understanding the fundamentals extremely well,” as one money manager puts it. Oh, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA in finance and accounting, both from the University of Chicago, worked at South Korea’s SK Telecom Co. and in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs Group before joining BofA Merrill in November 2009. — Carolyn Koo