Record first quarter: Asia buyout deals total $46.5 billion

As per Refinitiv statistics, the amount of venture capital deals in Asia hit $46.5 billion in the first three months of 2022, increasing 340 per cent from the same time the previous year. Despite global turmoil, the area continues to provide a variety of acquisition prospects, setting a new first-quarter milestone. The surge in transactions has coincided with many elevated Asian property investment transactions. EQT, a Swedish investment firm, agreed to buy Hong Kong-based Baring Private Equity Asia for €6.8 billion in March. As per people having knowledge of the matter, Blackstone-backed PAG, one of the region's largest private equity firms, filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong on Friday that could raise up to $2 billion.

With the PAG IPO, equity finance becomes a rare bright spot for Asia's public markets, where poor returns have made exits for early adopters incredibly hard. Worries over an increase in Covid-19 incidents in China, where officials started a partial lockdown of financial hub Shanghai this week, have disturbed markets already shaken by instability following Russia's incursion of Ukraine.

The latest spate of takeover acquisitions in Asia-Pacific follows a banner year for the sector. The amount of Asian venture capital assets soared to a historic high of about $300 billion in 2021, according to a report released by Bain & Company, while capital waiting to be deployed, climbed to more than $650 billion.


Private equity withdrawals also increased after two years of steep declines, with the price of exits more than doubling to $172 billion.

Investors said a pipeline from 2020 when the pandemic put several acquisitions on hold as investors waited for conditions to normalise, particularly in emerging nations across the region, drove much of the increase in private equity activity in 2021.

Yang expressed guarded optimism for Asia's outlook in the coming period but cautioned that China's personal equities market may lose steam amid fears over geopolitical tensions and slowing economic development, particularly if the disruption caused by lockdowns were more severe.