A large fund manager recently visited an Asian conglomerate and was given more time with the chairman than was expected. The reason? The fund’s status as a marquee name investor — a factor that Asian companies, particularly in China, appreciate increasingly when seeking to raise funds.
For merger and acquisition bankers in the region, having a short but powerful list of big-name investors is not new: they can present almost any deal to sovereign wealth funds and the region’s biggest tycoons. In the past few years, their list has lengthened with the addition of acquisitive tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, and some of China’s other increasingly active groups, including Fosun, Dalian Wanda and Anbang Insurance.
But Hong Kong’s recent flurry of initial public offerings and private share placements suggests that the M&A bankers’ colleagues working on equity fundraisings are also striving for quality rather than quantity in terms of backers.