Often viewed as “sticky” when it comes to exits, Southeast Asia’s private equity market is showing clearer liquidity outcomes as the post-pandemic reset reinforces valuation discipline and raises execution standards, DealStreetAsia’s Southeast Asia Private Equity Readout 2025 finds.
The report shows that liquidity events increased meaningfully in 2025, underpinned by a rebound in PE-backed IPOs alongside growing secondary transactions. While pricing adjustments remain ongoing, these channels point to an exit environment that is reopening, albeit on more exacting terms.
IPO activity involving PE-sponsored companies regained traction with nine listings, the highest annual volume since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, raising approximately $1.39 billion in aggregate proceeds. Although public markets reopened, valuation discipline remained intact. Average deal sizes stood at around $170 million, well below prior-cycle peaks, signalling that the recovery has been driven by execution certainty rather than scale.
Malaysia led PE-backed IPO activity by volume, with three listings raising just under $489 million in aggregate. This highlights the role of domestic exchanges in absorbing mid-sized sponsor-backed assets at realistic valuations. Singapore-based companies stood out for their larger deal sizes and sectoral concentration, particularly in health tech, while Thailand and Indonesia each recorded two PE-backed listings, pointing to a broader but selective reopening of public markets across the region.
While Indonesia ranked last in 2025 by total IPO value, the Indonesia Stock Exchange remains the most consistently accessible public market for PE-backed listings in Southeast Asia. Between 2021 and 2025, the IDX hosted 10 PE-backed IPOs raising a combined $4.05 billion, leading the region by volume in every year except 2024.
Rise in sponsor-to-sponsor deals
Secondary transactions remained the dominant source of liquidity for private equity exits in Southeast Asia in 2025, as sponsors continued to favour negotiated processes that prioritised execution certainty over headline valuation, the report finds.
A total of 35 secondary exits were completed during the year, marking the highest annual count since 2020. This underscores a market that remains operational despite tighter conditions, even as sponsors adjust expectations around timing, pricing and structure.
Identifiable exit value totalled $3.21 billion, roughly half the level recorded in the prior year. The decline reflects the absence of megadeals and ongoing price recalibration following the 2021–2022 valuation peak, rather than a deterioration in exit activity itself.
A total of 35 secondary exits were completed in 2025—the highest annual count since 2020.
“Post-pandemic, we’ve seen valuation discipline return, competition moderate, and a clearer separation between fundamental value-oriented investing versus growth-at-all-costs business models,” said Benny Lim, Partner & Head of Southeast Asia at Affinity Equity Partners.
The report further highlights a structural shift towards sponsor-led liquidity in the post-pandemic environment, driven in part by the need to deliver DPI in an extended holding period environment. Financial buyers have become an increasingly important source of exit capital, offering flexibility on structure, partial exits and staged liquidity that strategics are often less willing to provide.
By 2025, sponsor-to-sponsor transactions accounted for 15 of 35 exits, or 43% of total activity, doubling from just seven in the previous year, and generating $1.64 billion in disclosed value. This compares with 17 trade sales, two buybacks and one on-market sell-down, signalling a more balanced exit mix than in previous cycles.
Sponsor-to-sponsor exits are no longer a fallback option, but a core liquidity channel in SE Asia
This marks a clear departure from the 2021-2022 period, when exits were predominantly strategic-led. The transition was already evident in 2023 and 2024 as secondary volumes rose, and it has now become embedded. Sponsor-to-sponsor exits are no longer a fallback option, but a core liquidity channel in Southeast Asia’s evolving private equity market.
Lim said trade sales to global or regional strategics remain Affinity’s preferred exit route to achieve strong returns and deliver a clean exit. However, he also acknowledged that sponsor-to-sponsor exits have also become more prevalent as interest in the region from global and regional firms has grown in recent years.
A diverse mix of sectors
The sector composition of PE-backed IPOs in Southeast Asia in 2025 marks a clear departure from the previous cycle. With no single sector dominating headline value, issuance has shifted away from valuation-led mega listings towards execution-driven offerings sized to clear the market, the report shows.
Health tech emerged as the leading sector by value, with Singapore’s Mirxes and Ultragreen.ai raising a combined $581 million. Their performance underscores public market appetite for defensive, scalable businesses with clear revenue visibility and differentiated technology, particularly in sectors aligned with long-term demographic and healthcare demand. The emphasis was less on growth optionality and more on commercial traction and predictability.
Beyond health tech, retail and FMCG accounted for two IPOs, while logistics and supply chain assets also featured. Together, these sectors reinforce the market’s bias towards cash-generative, real-economy businesses with tangible operating leverage. Speculative or narrative-led growth sectors remained largely absent, reflecting tighter public market thresholds and sponsors’ willingness to bring only execution-ready assets to market.
Health tech emerged as the leading sector by value for PE-backed IPOs.
Secondary exits, by contrast, displayed a far broader sector footprint. The 35 transactions completed in 2025 spanned more than 20 sectors, including healthcare, food and beverage, hospitality, FMCG, fintech, digital banking, data analytics and health tech. No single sector accounted for more than four deals, highlighting the role of the secondary market as a cross-sector liquidity mechanism rather than a sector-specific outlet.
This divergence underscores a structural distinction between exit channels. IPO markets continue to concentrate around a narrow set of sectors deemed acceptable by public investors, while secondary transactions provide sponsors with flexibility to realise value across a much wider range of industries.
While consumer-facing businesses remained prominent, continued deal flow in technology-related sectors indicates that assets are still transacting despite a broader valuation reset, the report concludes.
Acquisitions hold steady
In contrast to an improving exit environment, private equity deployment through acquisitions in Southeast Asia remained relatively steady, as buyers continued to engage in a mix of buyout and minority transactions amid tighter financing conditions, the report finds.
Deal volume maintained its momentum with 24 transactions, while disclosed value declined to $6.1 billion from $7.56 billion across 24 deals in 2024. The moderation in value reflects pricing discipline rather than a pullback in investment appetite, as sponsors continued to favour majority and co-control positions with clear value-creation levers.
This pattern aligns with the broader post-pandemic adjustment. After a sharp rebound in 2022 and a recalibration in 2023, higher interest rates, valuation resets and reduced leverage availability have reshaped deal structures and entry pricing. Importantly, these shifts have not materially suppressed deal flow, but have instead reinforced a more selective, execution-led approach to deployment.
Singapore remained the largest source of PE-driven acquisition activity in 2025, recording 11 transactions with $742 million in disclosed and estimated value. While deal volume was broadly stable year-on-year, aggregate value declined due to the absence of outsized transactions, underscoring a tilt towards mid-sized, control-focused deals and minority acquisitions.
From a sector standpoint, PE acquisitions have continued to centre on healthcare, financial services and education, sectors that combine defensive characteristics with scalable growth and lend themselves to platform and consolidation strategies. In 2025, deal activity extended beyond core verticals into FMCG, real estate, renewables, agribusiness and infrastructure-adjacent assets.
The report argues that renewable energy infrastructure is set to play an outsized role in the next phase of PE deployment, driven by rising power demand from industrialisation, electrification and digitalisation.
“While the region was initially slow in adopting renewables, the emergence of firm renewables plus battery storage is allowing this region to leapfrog directly to baseload and mid-merit renewables rather than going through the intermittent renewable transition that most regions in the world had to go through,” said Rahul Agrawal, Managing Director & Head of SEA Energy at Actis.
Agrawal said Southeast Asia is projected to account for more than a quarter of global energy demand growth through 2035, with renewables expected to meet over half of the region’s incremental electricity needs, reinforcing the case for renewable energy as a cost-competitive and increasingly attractive investment focus.
The Southeast Asia Private Equity Readout 2025 report has extensive data on:
- PE-backed IPOs in SE Asia (2020–2025): Annual count, proceeds, and country-wise breakdown.
- Exit activity by channel: Volume and disclosed value of exits by IPOs, secondary deals, strategic sales etc.
- PE acquisition trends: Number, value, and sector distribution of acquisitions by PE firms.
- Insights from industry insiders
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