About

Horace Wenn has been with global paints, coatings, and specialty materials business PPG for more than 12 years. First starting as an external counsel from DLA Piper, he joined PPG as their first Asia-based legal counsel, and was promoted to general counsel Asia Pacific three years later. A nominating source explains how Wenn built PPG’s Asia legal and compliance risk control system ‘with [his] hands’ from scratch, and has also created a lean yet supportive team of five lawyers across 14 jurisdictions. PPG is constantly active in M&A activities, and the legal team has led many successful transaction deals and managed the integration cases seamlessly. PPG is a company with 135 years of existence, and although it is a relatively new entrant into the Asia market, it was one of the few global chemical companies that first invested in China in the 1980s. As such, Asia Pacific is seeing aggressive expansion by the business and because of this, the legal team faces a number of complex challenges. A nominator says this requires ‘smart and switched-on lawyers to take care of daily challenges’, adding that Wenn talks about his biggest achievement as, ‘apart from supporting the company’s Asia business from 13 years old to 25 years old, [being] proud of the fact he has so far been successfully training, motivating and protecting the legal team members, [having] created and maintained an internal environment with liberty’.