Live on Bloomberg TV

00:00Well from the numbers we can see that Asia is doing better in terms of its share of the peace deals but it's still a China story isn't it . Yeah I think it's a lot of it is a China story and a lot of it is a Coke with 19 story right. China is perceived by investors as having done better with control of controlling the virus than other jurisdictions have. So China is open for business. So investors think it's attractive . What is the outlook. I mean even a 20 percent of the pie . Still lagging behind Europe and the US. Some say that perhaps is the region's more demanding exit environment that's holding it back . Yeah there's the Manning exit environment. There is also the regulatory issue might be the thing that we always deal with regardless of where we're looking at in Asia whether it's India Southeast Asia or China is you know are there regulatory constraints that don't allow for foreign investments or make it difficult for you to get your foreign exchange out of the country. ISE quantities . Marcia. Much of the first quarter in private equity was mostly about portfolio bailouts. It was about keeping cash on the sidelines. Is now the time to actually start deploying some capital and using that dry powder to step up some distressed assets. What do your clients sit now . Well I'll say that my clients actually are quite active now and we've seen a significant uptick from beginning of July. A little earlier than that we are we're running a co-investment process like right now where it is significantly oversubscribed . It's in the help. It's in the grocery retail sector. And so that is a very popular sector. I think that people are willing to write a checks right now . What do you think those plain vanilla buyouts are going to come back . Well we're. We're running two disposal processes for funds and one of them is an auction process where we've got a lot of funds on them us based that are bidders in that auction. So I think that the buyout process we're seeing it coming. It's not going to be in the you know the bulge backed by out right now. It's going to be mid-market. But I think we will see a lot of that in the second half . We will see what the cove. In fact there's been a lot of shocks particularly the E the tech space. There's not a pivot interestingly into kind of domestic demand as well. Do you think these are some trends that are just are permanent now and here to stay Marsha . So I think some of those trends are permanent. So we've seen a big uptick in for example Internet data center interest. So real estate funds are pivoting to doing Internet data centers and are pivoting to doing logistics warehouses to support e-commerce businesses. And I think a lot of that is is more permanent at other things. Who knows. We'll see . I'm just wondering whether funds are reorganizing and how they view the longer term prospects arising from from the pandemic . And is there a sense that it could be more divestments going forward . Well I mean you know the fun you always have divestments and you have to have acquisitions right. So there'll be about about equal. They are looking at situations where large companies want to sell off units and funds may acquire those units. So separate businesses the funds I work with are are looking at a lot of those opportunities. Where for example listed companies need to divest a unit that does a somewhat different business in their core business. And I think you'll see more of those .

No schedule data available.

Private Equity Funds Are Quite Active: Morrison & Foerster

Marcia Ellis, partner and co-head of Asia private equity practice at Morrison & Foerster LLP, discusses the outlook for the region amid the coronavirus outbreak. She speaks with Haslinda Amin and Yvonne Man on "Bloomberg Markets: Asia." (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Markets
"Bloomberg Markets" is focused on bringing you the most important global business and breaking markets news and information as it happens.
More episodes and clips