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| Hugo Virag, managing director and co-head of Southeast Asia at Astris Finance (centrr), received the award |
Astris Finance has been awarded the outstanding deal advisor prize at the Vietnam M&A Forum 2025. How does the award reflect the company's role and impact in Vietnam's M&A landscape?
We are very grateful for having been named “Outstanding M&A Advisory Firm of the Year 2024-2025” by the independent jury of VIR on the occasion of our first participation in this M&A Forum. It is a market recognition of Astris Finance's achievements in Vietnam as an M&A financial advisor, and a positive signal sent to our client base as to the growth potential of the Vietnamese market. It is also nice to make us known by our peers for future collaboration.
Could you share some key M&A deals in Vietnam that Astris Finance has successfully advised?
Over the past five years, Astris Finance has closed several M&A transactions, including Series B and Series C for developers of renewable energy projects in Vietnam. These include the sell-down of a prominent wind farm platform to Singapore-based investor SARA, which has received one of the “Best M&A Deals of the Year Award 2024-2025”, and acted as buy-side advisor of one of the largest Japanese power generation groups in connection with the acquisition of a reference minority stake in a listed renewable energy company in Vietnam.
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| SARA honoured for “Best M&A Deal of the Year Award 2024-2025” |
Why are renewable energy M&As becoming a key focus area for Astris Finance in Vietnam?
Astris Finance M&A services in Vietnam (buy-side, sell-side, and capital raising) came as a natural extension of our project finance advisory services in the renewable energy sector. In 2018, Astris Finance arranged first-of-its kind debt financing for the 40 MW Dam Nai wind farm with one of the largest Vietnamese banking groups.
In parallel with our project finance advisory activity, the M&A sector has grown as renewable energy becomes bigger in terms of MW built. Given Astris Finance early move into Vietnamese renewables, we are well positioned to provide M&A services to our clients.
What are Astris Finance's strengths that make the company a successful advisor for renewable energy M&A deals?
We have “boots on the ground” in markets where there is a growth story for M&A services in the energy and infrastructure sectors. We identified early on the potential of the Vietnamese market and opened operations via our office in Ho Chi Minh City in 2018. We will continue to grow our presence there.
Beyond the technical aspects (due diligence, valuation, execution), an M&A transaction is the story of a group of men and women wanting to create a venture for creating value. Ultimately, the success of an M&A transaction may lean on the capacity to resolve a cultural gap and/or divergence on market practices. This is where our presence in relevant regional markets is very useful when it comes to helping parties to bridge that gap.
What is Astris Finance's plan to expand M&A consulting services to meet the growing demand for renewable energy M&As in Vietnam?
In the short term, as we believe the M&A secondary market in the energy sector will remain active in 2025-2026, and we expect to continue to mobilise more resources next year. We also cross-fertilise on our global experience to be more present in the infrastructure sectors such as water, waste-to-energy, and digital infrastructure.
In the long term, we anticipate that more domestic Vietnamese groups will strategically expand activities regionally, and then globally. Over the past 25 years, we have advised on over 400 transactions and $60 billion of investment in the infrastructure and energy space, from the Americas to Southeast Asia. We are therefore well-positioned to assist domestic groups' geographic expansion.
