Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Not alone, not at all

I find myself in a funny kind of situation now. Around six months back, I was flooded with queries from owners of landbanks across India for investors in their projects. Valuations were reigning high then and deals were difficult to cut since investors found nothing much left on the table for them.

Now the valuations have declined and I have a slew of big ticket investors (including a couple funds that just closed billion $ rounds) looking for some big ticket deals in the infrastructure / Real Estate sector. But projects are hard in coming since nowadays companies feel they are valued too low and if they could wait a while, the projects would fetch desired valuations.

In either case, I feel stumped. Most of my friends in I-Banking/strategic advisory circle feel the same way. It’s almost an year since they’ve formally closed any deal. When sentiments are extreme, deals are difficult to close. I thought may be it’s difficult because I run on my own and may be with some institutional tailwind behind me, could’ve closed some large deals. But now I learn it’s the same scene everywhere. Only that they’ve larger overheads to bear with transaction support teams needing to be paid even as they have no transactions to support :-)
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