Asia Pacific M&A Review 2015

Herbert Smith Freehills is pleased to announce the publication of its second annual Asia Pacific M&A Review, offering insights into trends in Asia Pacific from our M&A experts across the region.

This year’s Review considers M&A performance in 2014 and looks forward to prospects for 2015 across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. We also provide an industry focus, looking at developments in private equity, energy, mining and telecommunications media and technology. 

Some of the key themes we saw in 2014 include:

• Building on the recovery observed in the second half of 2014, we saw deal volumes generally pick up across the Asia Pacific region. The rebound was strongest in Australia, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.
• Incremental regulatory reform as well as bilateral agreements between Asia Pacific nations completed during 2014 should create conditions supportive of M&A activity going forward.
• The TMT sector performed strongly in 2014, with deal values up 46.9%. TMT transactions represented 13.1% of all M&A transactions in the Asia Pacific region in 2014.

Looking ahead, we anticipate the following for the Asia Pacific market in 2015:

• Investors to be presented with numerous and varied investment opportunities across the Asia Pacific region, including potential investment opportunities in SOEs in China and South Korea and energy projects in Australia.
• Private Equity is anticipated to be active across the Asia Pacific regions, with the players to include domestic and global private equity firms.
• It is expected that deal volume in 2015 will be driven by the financial services, energy, property and TMT sectors across the Asia Pacific region.