Asian mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity grew at a record pace in the first quarter of the year, as investment bankers scrambled to help foreign firms tap the region’s growing markets, and to fund local companies’ expansion abroad.
Bankers expect the volume of deals involving Asian companies to continue to swell throughout the year, but said it was difficult to predict with certainty due to an unusually cloudy global economic outlook.
Asia Pacific M&A excluding Japan represented a record 23 percent of announced global M&A volume for the first quarter, up from 10 percent a year earlier and 13 percent in the first quarter of 2008, according to Dealogic data.
Asian companies can turn to local lenders to finance their shopping spree as the Asian local-bank market was never as hard hit by the financial crisis as those in the US and Europe, and so is recovering faster.
To view the full article (note: you must be a Wall Street Journal Online subscriber), visit The Wall Street Journal Online.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal Online)