We see excitement amongst Chinese companies to expand into ASEAN: CGS International Securities CEO

Regards to that, I think the first half performance, I think that most people would agree that the has been quite underwhelming as well as you know little less than expected. Regards to I think the the deal activity and and the drag is coming from mainly from if you look at it basically and look across all the deal activity it's been down but you know 25 to 35% M&AIPOS full on activity and so on. China loans down by 29%, so that actually accounts for a lot of the of the downturn in the activity. So rate cuts can't come soon enough. Well, I wouldn't say rate cuts is one factor, but I think there are others in play. I mean obviously you know the market conditions have to be right. If you drill down to the ISM four and specifically the deal activities even dropped even further and by almost basically by close to about 40%. One, only about one point, $1.1 billion was raised in terms of IPO and for us at CGS International and for us we're lucky because I think that no, we're new kid on the block and we managed to, you know, to do about 29 deals in the marketplace. But on the on the equity side, only about 5 raising about, you know, 1.8 billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Carol. So there's so much to discuss in terms of the markets in in the ozone region. One of the key themes that many investors are speaking about, I'm sure your clients as well, is the impact of supply chain shifts for say from China elsewhere. And there's growing discussion and evidence indeed of more Chinese investment coming, for example, to Indian, Vietnam, but also to Malaysia and Thailand and so and so forth. Are you seeing any of that from a deal perspective? Is that is that helping your business at all? Absolutely, right. In fact, I just came back from a trip from Beijing and I think that the excitement from Chinese companies is there. They're all looking to expand overseas. You know, the China plus one strategy definitely in focus. I met about 10 to 15 private equity firms and they're all looking to expand into, into ASEAN markets. So definitely the, the, the impetus is there. And from our perspective, CGS International, just last Friday, we launched actually the first dual listing of a Chinese stock to be listed in Singapore, the first ever. And we're working on treat for the mandates and I think that's going to, with this happening, I think it's going to open the floodgates to more or less things in Singapore. And, and do you see any risk that if the US starts to say crack down, not as much on Chinese manufacturers, but then broad broadens that out and says, well, if you're just setting up a plant and not doing a lot of valued value that that sort of camouflage Chinese exports is, is that a risk to that, that, that flow into ASEAN? That is a slight risk, but I actually would like to look at the advantages of that. The reason I say that is because when Chinese companies come out into ASEAN, they need to partner with the local players. So it doesn't mean that Chinese have to own 100% of their business. I think it's important that the that, you know, as China rules out, it's China plus one strategy. They have to work with partners in the region. And if we see that happening a lot and like I said, I see just international sales. We have actually done one M and a deal where basically a Chinese company bought over an Indonesian company and it ended in by 100%. Yeah. So I think the if you can actually calibrate and have Chinese parentage but strong local presence, I think it's going to be a win win for everyone.