EXS Capital leads $37m investment in Vietnam RE developer

SKL, the property arm of Sonkim Investment & Development Corporation, claims to be one of Vietnam's leading property development groups. The firm has a portfolio of real estate projects covering residential and commercial properties and hotels and resorts.

SKL has six projects in the pipeline including two large-scale mixed-use developments - comprising apartments, serviced apartments, retail and office space - in central Ho Chi Minh City as well as a high-end residential buildings in the same area.

EXS says it has been focused on Vietnam since late 2011. It describes the country as having a fundamentally strong economy suffering from temporary market dislocations, drawing comparisons between Vietnam's capital crisis of 2010-2012 and China's economic crises in 1994-95 and 2003-04.

"Our experience in China during that era taught us that smart investors who could see past the temporary dislocation and use it to make opportunistic investments in great companies, did extremely well over the long term," said Eric Solberg, founding partner and CEO of EXS. "As contrarian value-driven investors, we saw the biggest gap between the real economy and asset prices in more than a decade as a good time to go in."

In addition to the $37 million, EXS plans to make further commitments that could bring the investment to $50-80 million.

"We've found that Asian high net worth investors are increasingly preferring direct deals rather than investing in a blind pool fund," added Solberg. "In a challenging legal and regulatory environment, both the investors and the management team are demanding a more sophisticated trade off."

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Real estate
• Expansion
• Real estate
• Real estate
• Vietnam
• Real estate
• Growth capital