Asia Pacific's energy,mining, utilities M&A jumps 3-fold in Q1

Asia Pacific's energy, mining and utilities (EMU) sector focused merger and acquisition jumped three fold in the first quarter this year, with Australia emerging as the most popular target, says a Mergermarket report.
According to the global deal tracking firm, EMU was the only sector that recorded a year-on-year growth in the Asia Pacific excluding Japan region and registered a rise of 323 per cent year-on-year in the January-March 2017.
Australia was the most popular target country for EMU sector with 55 per cent of deals, followed by South East Asia (28.6 per cent).
India and Mongolia tied for the third place with 5.2 per cent of deals each.

The growth of activity in the EMU sector is no surprise and is likely to continue throughout 2017, should oil and commodity prices stabilise further, leading to more opportunistic deals, Mergermarket's Adam Orlando said.
Orlando further noted that this momentum is carried over from 2016 and there is an expectation that rising metal prices in particular will whet the M&A appetite of dealmakers.

One of the top deals in the EMU sector in the Asia Pacific region was Duet Group's USD 9.8 billion buyout by a consortium led by Hong Kong-based Cheung Kong Property and Saudi Arabian Oil's 50 per cent stake purchase in Malaysian petrochemical project RAPID at USD 7 billion.

TMT (technology, media and telecommunication) took the top spot in all Asia-Pacific. The Idea-Vodafone India's merger was India's largest deal and was also the top deal in the TMT section globally for the January-March period of this year.
This one deal made up 70 per cent of total Indian M&A between January-March 2017, the report said.