Private equity dealmaking in Southeast Asia has remained robust despite a prolonged exit slowdown, as fund managers continue to deploy capital across the region while holding onto portfolio companies for longer, according to speakers at DealStreetAsia’s Indonesia PE-VC Summit 2026.
“2025 was a somewhat exciting and busy year. We were quite fortunate to complete close to 20 transactions, including bolt-on acquisitions… and we see the momentum continuing into 2026,” said SeaTown Holdings’ managing director for private equity Dickson Loo.
Singapore remains the largest source of PE-driven acquisitions in the region, with 11 transactions totaling $742 million identified so far in 2025, per Southeast Asia Private Equity Readout 2025. While deal count matches 2024’s 11 deals, the aggregate value was much higher at $3.18 billion, highlighting the absence of outsized transactions rather than a slowdown in deal flow. Last May, SeaTown committed S$115 million to AddVita, a Singaporean healthcare and life sciences distribution company with a buy-and-build plan.
For fund managers with more flexible capital solutions, Anupam Behura, partner at Bain’s Asia special situations team, thinks the current higher interest-rate environment has raised private equity investors’ cost of capital, widening the bid-ask spread, but this has not reduced deal activity.
Instead, transactions are increasingly being financed through private credit, meaning deal flow remains strong but is shifting to different parts of the capital structure. “Deal activity remains strong. From that perspective, it’s just a function of which part of the capital structure it’s flowing into,” said Behura.
Some of the large-cap transactions in the region last year are in the real asset segment, such as Actis’s S$600-million acquisition of 800 Super from Keppel; Bain’s investment in Blackstone’s Avery Lodge portfolio; and Stonepeak’s $1.3 billion investment in Warburg Pincus-backed Princeton Digital Group.
This year, KKR bought the remaining 82% stake in ST Telemedia Global Data Centres for S$6.6 billion (about $5.1 billion) through a consortium with Singtel in a deal that valued the data centre firm at around $10.9 billion just weeks after DayOne raised a new $2 billion round from Coatue and INA.
Exit dearth
Notwithstanding the deal activity, what remains challenging for the region is on the exit front. “DPI will continue to be a bit of pressure for fund managers,” Loo said, reflecting the strain of delivering returns in a market where exit opportunities remain limited.
One challenge is the limited depth of ASEAN capital markets, according to Huai Fong Chew, Regional Lead, East Asia & the Pacific Funds, International Finance Corporation. Many companies can’t list, and those that do often face weak liquidity, pushing fund managers toward strategic buyers, Chew said.
“If the company that a GP is trying to sell is not in the top three in that category, the asset may not get that much attention,” she said, noting it takes time to develop companies to make them attractive for sale. A prolonged hold period in private equity can weigh on the internal rate of return.
Companies bought during high-valuation periods can also be hard to exit, sometimes only selling at cost. “Entry valuations were high at a certain vintage. Companies that were bought during those years are very hard to offload. Investors could never sell them back or never sell them for above cost, so the entry multiple discipline needs to be there, and if not, then it could be really a function of cutting losses.”
That’s why maintaining discipline on entry multiples is crucial, as otherwise exits can become exercises in cutting losses. “A lot of GPs haven’t reached that stage yet, but over time, with the IRR drag, we might see more of those adjustments,” she added.
The good news is that 2025 has sparked hopes with a growing pipeline of fresh private equity-backed listings across Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Private equity-backed IPOs have fueled a 54% jump in Southeast Asia’s public market proceeds, to about $5.6 billion, in the first ten-and-a-half months, per a recent Deloitte report.
Malaysia’s Creador has seized the moment with the $174-million Thai listing of its portfolio MR. DIY Holdings and the $230-million Malaysian debut of Eco-Shop, which is trading at a price-earnings (P/E) ratio above 30, while Tealive’s parent company and Big Care Pharma in Malaysia are expected to be next in line. Indonesia also had a few high-profile IPOs like Affinity Equity Partners-backed Yupi, East Ventures-backed Fore Coffee, and Grab-backed SuperBank.
“Last year was a good lesson learned for the private equity sectors on how they could exercise the market opportunity to get the better valuation and to get more market exposure for them in the Indonesian market…” said Saptono Adi Junarso, Senior Advisor to Listing Directorate, IDX. “I think we are now in the growth stage of the capital market as an exit strategy for the private investors to get better valuation to the companies.”
That cycle is, however, facing a hiccup after MSCI warned that Indonesia’s $1.4-trillion economy could be downgraded from “emerging” to “frontier” market status due to transparency issues in ownership and trading, prompting the government to promise capital market reforms. The Indonesian Stock Exchange recently released draft rules setting minimum free-float requirements for new listings, aiming to address concerns raised by MSCI that triggered an $80-billion market selloff in the last week of January.
