The leveraged finance market continues to offer opportunities in the region and there is a lot of capital that still need to be put to work, according to Pankaj Agrawal, executive director for syndicated finance at DBS.

In a recent roundtable on leveraged finance led by The Asset, Agrawal says growth is still strongest in Asia, compared to other regions, and countries such as India and Indonesia, despite falling behind expectations, are still likely to do better in the near future. China continues to exhibit a strong appetite for acquisitions and M&A activity.

Mike Samson, managing director and regional head of leveraged finance for Asean at Standard Chartered Bank says that not all segments of the loan syndication market have suffered a decline, noting that leveraged buyouts, acquisitions and dividend recaps have recovered from 2015.

The loan activity in 2016 in Southeast Asia “has been flattered by one or two very large transactions,” he says, for example the US$6.2 billion acquisition of Thailand’s hypermarket operator Big C supercenter by Berli Jucker in March.

“The acquisition market has shown a bit of a recovery from 2015,” adds Samson, “but it is only 10% to 11% of the total volume [of the loan market] so it cannot in any way move the needle. And he warns: “This recovery may be quite short-lived. We’re looking at a very uncertain horizon for acquisitions. There will be a lot of smart money sitting on the sidelines waiting for volatility to die down.”