Hillhouse-backed Ascentium buys fellow business services firm Dezan Shira, as the platform tries to ride China’s surge in outbound investment |
Hillhouse-backed Ascentium buys fellow business services firm Dezan Shira, as the platform tries to ride China’s surge in outbound investment
Ascentium, an Asia-based business services platform backed by Hillhouse Investment, is acquiring Dezan Shira & Associates, a 33-year-old advisory firm best known for its Asia Briefing intelligence platform. The deal is Ascentium’s most recent in more than a dozen acquisitions, plugging a gap in the company’s mainland China coverage while deepening its footprint in hot Southeast Asian growth markets.
“We did not have a meaningful capability to service multinational corporations that wanted to go into mainland China,” Lennard Yong, Ascentium’s co-founder and CEO, tells Fortune. The acquisition adds new offices in mainland Chinese cities like Guangzhou and Tianjin, and pairs Ascentium’s outbound expertise with Dezan Shira’s inbound knowledge.
Chinese outward investment reached $174 billion last year, a 7% increase. A 2025 report from McKinsey notes that China is now a net investor overseas, partly due to decreased inward flows from the U.S. and Europe, but also because Chinese firms are racing to diversify supply chains and........