Sternship Advisers

Sternship Advisers

Sternship Advisers formed in mid-2017 when Neil Hamilton and Tim Day, the chairman and head of UBS’s Perth office, launched their own advisory boutique. Hamilton had chaired Oz Minerals, Western Power, and Mount Gibson Iron; Day had run UBS Perth for seven years and earlier helped lead the $2 billion-plus energy asset sale for Babcock & Brown in New York. The firm positions itself as a conflict-free shop staffed entirely by senior bankers — no junior-led deal teams — serving mid-market corporates, family-owned businesses, and institutional clients across Australia and the Asia Pacific. The practice splits into two mandates. Corporate Advisory handles domestic and cross-border M&A, takeover defence, strategic investments, trade sales, demergers, joint ventures, and private equity buyouts. The Equity Capital Markets division, formed in mid-2020 through the merger with Rob Hamilton’s Ashanti Capital, runs pre-IPO, IPO, reverse takeover, convertible, and secondary-market placements for listed and unlisted companies. Transaction examples displayed on the firm’s site include the A$400 million acquisition of MPC Kinetic, the A$639 million acquisition of Magnetic Resources, and the $230 million IPO of a client the firm does not name. The ECM franchise leans heavily on an ultra-high-net-worth distribution network and long-standing institutional relationships built during the team’s UBS, Macquarie, and Goldman Sachs tenures. The firm lists ten professionals on its website, including four directors — Denis Dwiputra, Robert Thomson, Hugo Packer, and Rob Hamilton — plus associate director Yvonne Hoy. Hugo Packer spent eight years at Goldman Sachs across Perth and London; two other associates arrived from PwC’s valuation practice and a boutique Melbourne investment bank. The group operates from a single Subiaco address. Mid-2020 also saw the launch of the Ashanti Investment Fund, managed by Rob Hamilton, giving Sternship a dedicated investment vehicle that sits alongside the advisory business and offers clients an additional capital channel. What distinguishes Sternship from a standard Australian corporate-advisory firm is the deliberate architecture of its ECM franchise. By merging with Ashanti instead of building capital-markets capabilities inside the UBS diaspora, the firm gained an existing ultra-high-net-worth distribution network and a pre-funded investment fund — neither of which a typical advisory-only spinout possesses. That dual structure means Sternship can originate a deal, place it through a curated private-wealth network, and, in some cases, deploy balance-sheet capital alongside, all while remaining smaller and nimbler than the bulge-bracket platforms its founders left.