23 September 2020
BDA’s Paul DiGiacomo talks to AVCJ on Asian PE exits
AVCJ
September 23, 2020
by Tim Burroughs
Asia exits: Liquidity lags
BDA Partners, for example, reported a relatively less active March and April, but saw business start to ramp up from May. The focal points are markets that have so far coped with COVID-19 most effectively: China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam. Much of the work is pitching for mandates and preparing to launch new deals or transactions that were pulled earlier in the year and are now being reactivated.
“Everyone has internalized the fact that we aren’t going back to normal. This is how we are all going to be interacting over the next 6-12 months, so if you want to be active you need to find a way to get things done with the restrictions that COVID-19 throws up,” says Paul DiGiacomo, a senior managing director at BDA. “We are broadly optimistic about M&A activity, but especially private equity exit activity, and I definitely wouldn’t have told you that in April.”
…
“What we now pay attention to that we didn’t as much before is who has boots on the ground, and who has had previous engagement with the company,” says BDA’s DiGiacomo. “Even if you don’t have a local team, you might have spent some time getting to know the company pre-COVID and had face-to-face interaction and visited the facilities. It is much harder if you have never met the company before and you have no one on the ground who could satisfy that requirement.”
