FOR over a decade now, Deloitte's corporate finance practice has been consistently completing one merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction after another for prominent entrepreneurs and institutions in Malaysia, successfully carving a reputation for themselves.
Deloitte Corporate Finance specialises in M&A advisory where it advises and manages acquisition, divestment and fund-raising exercises for its clients.
"We changed the focus of our general corporate finance advisory units into specialist M&A advisory focused units in Malaysia over 10 years ago and we've been razor focused on that ever since," said Deloitte Malaysia M&A leader Yap Kong Meng, who was a pioneer hire in the transformation.
More recently, he advised the Teng family on the sale of the Jaya Grocer business to Grab Holdings Ltd, Southeast Asia's leading tech platform.
"Specialised M&A advisers based in Malaysia are a rare breed and many transactions are not represented by advisers like us. When advising sellers, we focus on managing closed-auction styled sale processes and ensuring our clients' key transaction objectives are met. In advising buyers, we focus on, among others, identifying targets, developing transaction structure and terms, assessing target value, identifying and addressing transaction risks, and facilitating buyer's internal governance and approval processes required for a transaction."
Yap said in the past decade in Malaysia, Deloitte had created immense value for clients by leveraging their global network of relationships, industry knowledge and M&A experience to support the entire lifecycle of transactions they advise.
"Laymen tend to associate our role with property brokers, which is quite a misnomer. Advising and managing the acquisition or sale of a business is far more complicated than acquiring or selling an object like a property or a car.
"A business is really a dynamic and fragile ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, partners and regulators, among others.
"For example, if you were to auction a business in the same way as you were to auction a property, you can seriously destroy the value of the business.
"Malaysia has a healthy M&A market with good flow of transactions annually but, within the Southeast Asian region, Singapore usually leads the M&A market in terms of deal count and deal value due to its role as the regional financial hub," he said.
Yap began his career with Arthur Andersen after the Asian financial crisis.
In his initial years, he focused on a range of corporate finance sub-specialties including debt restructuring, insolvency and capital markets.
He specialised in M&A advisory upon joining the Deloitte Corporate Finance team in 2006, decision he has never regretted despite the punishing hours and challenging deadlines at times.
For those who would like to embark on this career path, Yap said junior professionals should be curious and work hard to learn all the specifics of each deal.
M&A activities in Malaysia recovered spectacularly last year as transaction volume spiked, driven by low interest rates from global monetary easing and high equity valuation despite the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many investors were cautious in 2020 over the effects of the pandemic but M&A activities surged towards the end of 2020.
"M&A deal volumes were declining sharply before improving again and hitting a high level last year. While we expect the strong deal momentum to continue this year with the reopening of various economies globally, we do expect deal volumes to perhaps decline at some point with rising interest rates, inflation and the Russia-Ukraine war.
"We are seeing plenty of activities in industry segments such as tech, digital and renewable energy, which are expected to thrive in the coming years. There are also activities in consumer-driven segments like food, healthcare and medical which will continue to be resilient despite the pandemic.
"It will be interesting to see how the deal landscape develops as we progress through 2022. It's been an interesting ride so far and I enjoy helping clients (buyers and sellers alike) to achieve excellent outcomes that they hope for," he said.
The writer was a journalist with The New Straits Times before joining a Fortune Global 500 real estate company. This article is a collaboration between the New Straits Times and Tradeview, the author of 'Once Upon A Time In Bursa'.