China’s HNA Group bought itself a spot on the Fortune 500 list this year — not once but twice in a span of months — as Chinese money flooded into the US corporate sector this year.
HNA closed its $6.5bn buyout of software distributor Ingram Micro in December, putting it in control of the US’s 64th-largest company by revenues. A few months earlier, the conglomerate, with holdings in insurance, airlines and department stores, agreed to pay about $6.5bn for a 25 per cent stake in Hilton Worldwide Holdings, which is 254th on the list of the biggest companies in the US.
Aggressively acquisitive groups such as HNA helped China dominate cross-border dealmaking in 2016. Companies from the country agreed $220.4bn in acquisitions, or about 16 per cent of global cross border activity, according to data from Thomson Reuters.