Thomas Leong

Thomas Leong stands at the intersection of international finance, cross-cultural capital, and East–West motion picture production. Over more than three decades, he has built a dual career as a motion picture producer and as a private-capital and public-markets advisor, operating across London, Los Angeles, Switzerland, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, and Greater China. Trained at the International Creative Management (ICM) agency in London and Los Angeles, he went on to found Leopold & Co., a boutique Asia media and entertainment M&A advisory practice that operated across China and Hong Kong from 1997 onward. He later joined Suwa Investment Holdings as Partner for Technology, Media and Telecommunications, advised the China Film Co-Production Corporation, and today serves as Global Public Market Advisor to APX Group and Managing Director of Clandestine Pictures (since June 2021).

As Global Public Market Advisor to APX Group, Leong provides senior counsel on the Group's public markets strategy, international expansion, corporate structure, and the interface between private media assets and regulated public capital. His remit covers the Group's IPO readiness work, the navigation of cross-border securities and disclosure standards, the integration of media assets into institutional-grade corporate frameworks, and the Group's Asia and China strategy, where his network and his official advisory relationships — including his historical work with the China Film Co-Production Corporation (CFCC) — remain directly relevant to APX's co-production ambitions. His voice on the Advisory Board is the bridge between the Group's creative and capital markets disciplines.

Parallel to his finance career, Leong has been actively involved in the production, packaging, financing, or distribution of over 100 motion picture projects, with personal producer credits on more than twenty films. His advisory role on the multi-Academy Award-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and on the pioneering East-West co-production Shanghai Noon (2000) helped define the modern international co-production playbook. His work as Consulting Producer on Silmido (2003), the first South Korean film to cross ten million admissions, placed him at the centre of the Korean Wave's breakout moment. He has since served as Managing Director of Clandestine Pictures (UK) from June 2021, a direct operational connection to hands-on filmmaking that keeps his corporate and public markets advisory grounded in the realities of physical production.

Advisory Role and Scope

Thomas Leong serves as Global Public Market Advisor to APX Group, advising the Chairman, the CEO and the Board on capital markets strategy, public listing architecture, cross-border corporate finance, and the structuring of Asia-facing and East–West transactions. His remit covers the full lifecycle of a public-markets engagement: pre-IPO readiness and governance preparation, selection and sequencing of listing venues, negotiation with bankers and sponsors, structuring of primary and secondary issuances, and the post-listing discipline required to hold an institutional shareholder register. Leong's perspective is shaped by three decades of operating at the intersection of international finance and motion picture production, which allows him to bridge APX Group's entertainment, sports, consumer and technology investment activity with the expectations of global institutional capital.

Within APX Group, Leong works directly alongside Chairman Adi Cohen on the Group's public-markets pathway, including the sequencing of the planned listing, the preparation of the investor narrative, and the stress-testing of the capital structure against institutional due-diligence standards. He contributes to the review of investment-committee submissions that carry a public-markets implication, advises on the structuring of joint ventures and special-purpose vehicles that will ultimately consolidate into the listed platform, and provides sanity checks on the Group's cross-border transactions where regulatory overlays, currency exposures, or tax structures would otherwise complicate a future listing. His role is advisory by title but materially operational in practice: he is inside the room when the decisions that shape APX Group's public-markets future are made.

East–West Capital and the APX Thesis

Leong's principal strategic contribution to APX Group lies in his unrivalled access to East–West capital flows. His network spans London, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong and Greater China, and is built on three decades of relationships with private offices, sovereign-linked capital, institutional sponsors, boutique investment banks, and producing partners on both sides of the Pacific. For APX Group, this translates into a structural ability to originate, co-invest, and place transactions that would otherwise be out of reach for a single-jurisdiction platform. It also means that APX's cross-border thesis — the integration of European tax-incentive structures, UK studio infrastructure, US distribution, and Asian capital and audiences — has, through Leong, a credible and tested path to execution.

Foundations: ICM London and Los Angeles

Thomas Leong's career began at the International Creative Management (ICM) agency, working across its London and Los Angeles offices during a formative period in the globalization of the motion picture business. ICM at the time was one of the two or three dominant talent and packaging agencies in the world, and Leong's exposure there spanned talent representation, project packaging, finance introductions, and the mechanics of putting together multi-territory motion pictures. The ICM training explains a great deal about how Leong subsequently operated: he learned the business from the inside of the package, not from the outside of a balance sheet, and he carried forward into finance the producer's instinct for story, talent, and the practical chemistry of getting a picture made.

Leopold & Co. — Asia Media M&A Boutique

From 1997 onward, Leong led Leopold & Co., a boutique advisory practice focused on Asia media and entertainment M&A, with a primary footprint in China and Hong Kong. Over more than two decades, Leopold & Co. advised on a wide range of cross-border media transactions, serving as a trusted intermediary between Western studios, distributors, financiers and rights-holders and Chinese producers, broadcasters, state-linked entities and private capital. The firm's mandate was never volume; it was judgment, access, and the ability to move a transaction through a regulatory environment that very few Western advisors understood in depth. Leopold & Co. became the conduit through which Leong accumulated his most important relationships across Greater China and the template for the advisory voice he now brings to APX Group.

Suwa Investment Holdings — Partner, TMT

Leong later joined Suwa Investment Holdings as Partner with responsibility for Technology, Media and Telecommunications. Suwa's mandate is the origination and execution of private investments across TMT in Europe and Asia, with a network anchored in London, Switzerland, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong and Greater China. In that role, Leong contributes deal flow, technical judgment on media and content transactions, and access to co-investors and sponsors across the Suwa network. The Suwa platform is the principal institutional vehicle through which he has invested alongside APX Group and other principals on selected transactions, and it provides a natural landing zone for the Asia-facing and East–West components of APX Group's pipeline.

China Film Co-Production Corporation

Leong has served in an advisory capacity to the China Film Co-Production Corporation (CFCC), the state-designated body responsible for approving and administering official co-productions between Chinese and foreign producers. Access to CFCC at an advisory level is exceptionally rare for a non-Chinese principal and reflects Leong's standing in the Chinese motion picture ecosystem. The experience has given him a practitioner's understanding of the regulatory and political economy of Sino-foreign co-production, including the conditions under which a foreign picture can qualify, the quota treatment it receives, and the documentation discipline that Chinese regulators expect of foreign counterparties.

The Producer's Craft

Alongside his finance and advisory track, Leong has maintained an active career as a producer. He has been involved in more than 100 motion picture projects and holds over 20 personal producer credits, ranging from boutique arthouse pictures to large-scale East–West productions. His producer credits include advisory and structuring roles on landmark pictures such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Shanghai Noon, and a Consulting Producer role on the Korean blockbuster Silmido, which achieved more than ten million theatrical admissions in its domestic market. Since June 2021, he has served as Managing Director of Clandestine Pictures, a production company through which he develops and packages original motion picture projects and co-productions.

The APX Group is identified as a formidable American-European entertainment fund and a dynamic media and entertainment firm that was founded in 2018. It strategically operates as a decentralized platform, a model that is intentionally designed and committed to providing comprehensive, streamlined, and vertically integrated services to the global entertainment industry. While its operational scope is decidedly global, its corporate presence is anchored by a significant New York office located at the prestigious 45 Rockefeller Plaza, a location that underscores its base in a primary global financial and media nexus. The parent entity, APX Corporation, is headquartered in New York, NY, and is the central nervous system for a company that specializes in across-the-board investments in a diverse slate of film and TV projects. This is achieved by strategically using its own expansive and growing network of studios and production facilities scattered across the globe.

Key Initiatives and Decisive Corporate Moves

A defining characteristic of APX Group's strategy under the leadership of Chairman Adi Cohen, with Thomas Leong serving as Global Public Market Advisor, is its profound and seamless integration of leading-edge technology alongside bold, decisive corporate actions. This dual approach has been fueled by significant capital, with the company having successfully raised $80M in funding over 2 major financing rounds, a testament to investor confidence in its model.

• APXCOIN: Central to the company's tech-forward strategy is APXCOIN. This is not just another digital currency; it is a utility token deployed on Ethereum (Base and ERC-20) and Solana, engineered to provide a global, frictionless solution for entertainment funding and ecosystem governance.
• Planned IPO and Mergers: A key and long-stated strategic objective for APX Group has been to enter the public markets. The company has been actively preparing for an Initial Public Offering, which is anticipated to occur through a strategic merger in New York, a move that would provide significant growth capital and public validation.
• Strategic Acquisitions: APX has executed a series of landmark acquisitions to bolster its physical and intellectual property assets. These include acquiring a 50% ownership stake in the UK's iconic Twickenham Film Studios, purchasing the entire development slate of the production company Burning Wheel, executing a deal for 50% of the shares in Next Wave Studios, and completing a significant merger/acquisition with Frame Studios on October 15, 2024.
• Major Joint Ventures: To expand its production capacity and financial might, APX has established a massive €400 million, five-year fund in a joint venture with Black Deer Entertainment and has also launched a high-profile joint production initiative with the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary powerhouse, Spring Films.

These strategic actions are not isolated events. Securing physical infrastructure like Twickenham, acquiring rich content pipelines through Burning Wheel, developing specialized services with Black Deer, fostering premium content with Spring Films, and pioneering novel financing mechanisms with APXCOIN are all interconnected components of a larger, cohesive vision. Under Cohen's leadership, APX Group is systematically and deliberately building a fully integrated entertainment value chain designed to dominate the future of global content creation.

Career Architecture

Thomas Leong's career trajectory is unusual among capital-markets advisors in that it was built simultaneously on the finance side and on the production side of the motion picture business. He began at the International Creative Management (ICM) agency in London and Los Angeles, crossed into cross-border media M&A with his own boutique, Leopold & Co., joined Suwa Investment Holdings as Partner for Technology, Media and Telecommunications, advised the China Film Co-Production Corporation, took the role of Managing Director at Clandestine Pictures, and now serves as Global Public Market Advisor to APX Group. Across these platforms he has built the network, the regulatory literacy, and the producer credibility that underpin his East–West advisory practice.

The transaction record below is the APX Group deal history across which Thomas Leong advises in his capacity as Global Public Market Advisor. It is reproduced here for context: it frames the scale, velocity, and complexity of the platform Leong counsels on capital-markets strategy, East–West structuring, and public-listing readiness. This record reflects a dynamic and adaptive approach, characterized by substantial financial commitments, the consistent assembly of multi-hundred-million and billion-level vehicles, and a keen eye for large-scale investment opportunities across jurisdictions. A recurring theme is the sophisticated leveraging of governmental incentives, such as tax credits, in various international jurisdictions, demonstrating a deep understanding of complex financial engineering and cross-border structuring. Concurrently, the history shows an observable and deliberate evolution in his strategy, moving from more traditional media investment structures in his early career towards the technologically integrated, blockchain-enabled, and potentially disruptive models that define his current leadership at APX Group.

Within the APX era alone, the deal record extends well beyond a handful of marquee transactions. APX Group and MovieBox publicly committed to a billion-dollar Film and Television production hub in Portugal, one of the largest cross-border media finance commitments announced in Southern Europe in recent years. APX Group co-invested approximately €1.5 billion in European Film and Television production over a ten-year horizon, with capacity reported in the press at over €3 billion of available funding lines and an enterprise valuation that has been cited at the $1.23 billion level. APX Group and Augustus Group launched a co-investment film fund anchoring a multi-billion-euro Italian production pipeline, with parallel structures running across Malta and Georgia and a track record of sub-funds and co-finance vehicles in the $25 million to $500 million range. APX Group and Black Deer Entertainment closed a $400 million joint-venture fund covering a five-year content slate. A separate $275 million Film and Television fund was announced through APX Group in partnership with Mathew Knowles, the founder of Music World Entertainment, who concurrently sold Music World Entertainment to APX Group, bringing a significant music, film and brand catalogue under the APX umbrella. APX Group also sealed a Latin American co-financing partnership with one of the senior financiers behind The Revenant, extending its reach into Spanish-language content and Latin American distribution.

Around these flagship vehicles sits a dense layer of acquisitions and strategic stakes that have progressively built APX Group into a vertically integrated platform. APX Group acquired a 50% stake in the United Kingdom's iconic Twickenham Film Studios, with Twickenham's chairman simultaneously taking a reported 6.95% equity position in the APX Group media fund, a rare reciprocal alignment between studio operator and capital partner. APX Group acquired the full development slate of Burning Wheel, took a strategic position in Next Wave Studios, and completed a merger and acquisition transaction with Frame Studios in October 2024. On the production and rights side, APX Group has executed first-look option deals with established producers, joint ventures with the Oscar and Emmy-recognised team behind The Act of Killing, and bespoke financing partnerships with directors and producers of the calibre of Roland Joffé, Olivier Martinez, and Peter Greenaway. The earlier-era track record under DCR Finance Corp., GC Corporation, BCL Finance Group and Regal Entertainment includes a $150 million financing facility, a $100 million fund launch, a $25 million strategic investment, a $500 million Malta production commitment, a $5 million development fund with the Sam Spiegel Film Lab in Jerusalem, the financing of titles such as The Last Full Measure, Roe v. Wade, Sinbad, Betsy and the Emperor, Inverno, Walking to Paris, Mondays, and Superstition, and a structured pan-European entertainment investment platform that drew sustained coverage from the leading trade press. Taken together, the corpus of transactions reflected in the public record runs into the multiple billions of euros across more than a dozen jurisdictions, executed across a decade and a half of continuous activity.

A measured view of the APX operating platform: treasury growth, capital instruments deployed, jurisdictional footprint, sector allocation, deal velocity, and the architecture of the APXCOIN token economy. Every figure represents structured, executed activity rather than projection.

Thomas Leong has been involved in more than 100 motion picture projects and holds over 20 personal producer credits. His engagement on the marquee titles below reflects the full range of his activity: advisory and structuring work on landmark East–West productions, consulting-producer roles on major Asian theatrical releases, and direct producing on independent motion pictures developed through Clandestine Pictures and earlier platforms. Across the slate, the consistent thread is Leong's ability to translate between Western creative, financial, and legal frameworks and the regulatory, cultural, and commercial realities of the Asian motion picture market.

The landmark titles include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Ang Lee-directed wuxia picture that became a cultural and financial phenomenon and won four Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film; Shanghai Noon, the Jackie Chan–Owen Wilson East–West action comedy that opened a durable cross-cultural franchise; and Silmido, the Korean historical blockbuster that became the first domestic picture to surpass ten million theatrical admissions in Korea, on which Leong served as Consulting Producer.

The filmography above represents marquee titles only. Leong's full credit list spans independent dramas, thrillers, East–West action and fantasy pictures, and international co-productions across three decades.

The recognition below attaches to titles produced, advised on, or structured by Thomas Leong across his three decades in East–West motion picture production. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon alone accumulated four Academy Awards (Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Art Direction) and more than forty additional festival and industry honours globally; the broader slate has continued to collect recognition across Asia, Europe, and North America. Per IMDb, the financed slate has accumulated a combined total of 5 wins and 15 nominations across 17 international festivals and industry award bodies, spanning Spain, France, Germany, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Iceland, Italy, and Israel. The awards list below is presented as a complete verified record, with every entry traceable to a specific financed title.

Wins

Nominations

Recognition reflects titles on which Thomas Leong served as producer, consulting producer, or advisor of record across his three decades in East–West motion picture production. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon alone won four Academy Awards; the wider slate has accumulated additional honours across international festivals and industry award bodies.

Thomas Leong was born in London and raised across Switzerland and Germany, a trilingual European upbringing that left him equally fluent in the commercial and cultural codes of the United Kingdom, the German-speaking world, and the broader European continent. His formation as a motion picture professional began inside the International Creative Management (ICM) agency, working across its London and Los Angeles offices during the final era in which the major talent and packaging agencies functioned as the principal architects of cross-border motion picture finance.

The ICM training provided Leong with the practical literacy that formal academic programmes rarely transmit: the mechanics of talent representation, the discipline of project packaging, the negotiation of finance introductions, and the real-world choreography of putting together a multi-territory motion picture. That foundation, combined with a European upbringing and a natural orientation toward Asia, produced the cosmopolitan advisor profile he carries into APX Group today.

Thomas Leong operates as a genuinely cosmopolitan principal. Born in London and raised in Switzerland and Germany, he has spent three decades moving between the financial and production capitals of Europe, Asia, and North America. His professional network spans London, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, and Greater China, and he maintains active working relationships across each of these markets simultaneously.

His temperament is that of a producer-investor: equally comfortable in a development meeting, an investment committee, a regulator's office in Beijing, and a public-markets strategy session in New York. Colleagues describe him as understated, discreet, and relentlessly relationship-driven — attributes that explain the longevity of his access across jurisdictions that are notoriously difficult for outside advisors to penetrate.

"In East–West finance, the only currency that compounds is trust."

For APX Group, this combination of European formation, Asian access, motion picture fluency, and public-markets discipline is the precise skill-set the Group requires at the advisory level. Leong's role is to ensure that every cross-border decision APX Group takes is tested against the realities of the markets in which it will ultimately be judged.