Opinion
The Asia real assets story
It is difficult to tell whether Asia is at the beginning of a real assets story or negotiating a transition phase somewhere around the middle. "Real assets" is such an all-encompassing term, taking in everything from forestry to energy to real estate,...
Forbidden fruit?
There used to be a time when a private equity fund buying the portfolio company of another private equity fund was a serious faux pas. Nowadays, GPs have become less shy about buying from peers, who in many cases might be selling good but un-exited assets...
Battle of the strategics
We have grown accustomed to China’s incumbent internet giants engaging in M&A. Since 2010, the BATS – Baidu, Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings and Sina – have deployed around $6.5 billion (and that’s just disclosed transactions), eight times the...
Have your say in the 2013 AVCJ Awards
Can anyone stop KKR? That is the question being asked as we launch the 2013 AVCJ Private Equity & Venture Capital Awards, now in their 13th iteration.
Foreign PE in Taiwan: Engagement issues
Taiwan has a lot to offer private equity: it is one of relatively few classic buyout markets in Asia, with control positions, the ability to put in new management, and banks that are willing leveraged lenders. Japan and Australia are the only markets...
The churn factor
Mid-cap Asian GPs are no strangers to staff turnover, with volatility tracking the peaks and troughs of different regional markets. In times of plenty, when China and India were booming, it seemed that a week couldn't pass without a manager spinning out...
Breaking down the buyout opportunity
Multinational corporations, with one eye on their precarious balance sheets, decide to cut their losses and offload divisions. Septuagenarian founders, keen to retire from the family business but with no obvious successor, agree that it's time to cash...
PE and China's financial sector flaws
The liquidity squeeze engineered by China's central bank in June, which temporarily made it more expensive for commercial banks to lend money to one another, was generally regarded as an effort to remind said banks about the importance of solid asset...
The problem with Southeast Asian VC
Ahead of last week's AVCJ Singapore Forum, this column was dedicated to the less-loved investment stories in Southeast Asia. VC made the list because, despite offering a similar fundamentals to China and India – rising disposable incomes and mobile...
Taiwan returns to the private equity map
I may have said this many times before but Taiwan, with its large number of world-class managers, manufacturing prowess and geographic proximity and cultural similarities to China, has the potential to be a leading investment destination for private equity...
Southeast Asia’s unloved
Southeast Asia is in vogue, seen by many as an increasingly credible alternative to China and India. Indonesia, as the region’s only market of scale, has naturally attracted the most interest. Virtually every regional and global private equity firm...
Regional update: A time to invest?
Is now the time to invest in Asia? This is a question that keeps popping up in my conversations with limited partners. Obviously, the simple answer can always be “yes.” That is if these LPs are able to locate and gain access to the fund managers that...
Positive signs from India
The last few years haven't been kind to Indian private equity. After a period of strong fundraising and bumper investment – a large portion of it into publicly-listed entities – the industry has largely been unable to deliver on the promise. Non-performers...
All smiles in Tokyo?
The timing of last year's AVCJ Japan Forum was perhaps fortuitous - a matter of days before the event Unison Capital announced that it agreed to sell sushi chain Akindo Sushiro to Permira for $1 billion.
China IPOs: Different this time
There are signs that the China listings logjam is gradually becoming unstuck, sowing seeds of hope for PE equity and VC investors fielding awkward questions from LPs about liquidity horizons. But markets are unlikely to bounce back to their former highs...
East meets West: China PE and European corporates
Asian companies have sunk nearly $9 billion into European assets so far this year. In 2012, the final total for Asia-to-Europe M&A was more than $54 billion across 200 or so deals, according to AVCJ Research. This is more than was deployed in the four...
The case for an LP presence in Asia
Time zones are a thorn in the side of LPs seeking to be more than just passive capital providers and participate more fully in GP relationships. The reality for the North American contingent that still meets the bulk of Asian managers’ capital needs...
Internal tensions
Henpecked husband versus nagging wives - this was the description attached to the china GP-LP relationship in a recent paper. It makes one think of the times fund managers have remarked on getting phone calls from some of their, erm, keener fund-of-funds...
Japan’s Indonesian ambitions
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC) is paying a princely sum for a slice of Indonesia's financial services sector. The price-to-book (P/B) valuation of the $1.56 billion it has agreed to pay for a 40% stake in Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional (BTPN)...
Have your say in the AVCJ China Awards
The China take-private, at least among companies listed in the US, is a relatively new phenomenon in private equity. As it stands, six - soon to be seven - deals have been successfully concluded and a further seven have received board approval, with only...
Something special
It wasn't long ago that Chinese GPs would turn their noses up at any suggestion of specialization. Buoyed by a flood of capital into private equity, the growth capital space morphed into a giant deal shop, with private equity firms pursuing several times...
Haves and have nots
It probably comes as no surprise to most readers that Asia Pacific fundraising in the first quarter of 2013 was much slower than in the past. When I covered the tough fundraising conditions in the March 18 viewpoint, I observed that the market is divided...
Princeling funds: Who's your daddy?
Another month, another princeling fund. Okay, so they're not that prolific but there is a familiarity to PE platforms built upon the shoulders of Chinese leaders' offspring in terms of the nature of their emergence.
A multi-faceted market
Of readers who have been following Asia’s private equity markets for some years, few would contest South Korea’s place as one of the more important locations for international investors. After all, apart from maybe Australia, it has been the region’s...