In this piece, we review Asia’s private credit and security-backed financing markets and summarize several key trends and major events. Looking towards 2022, we note eight key trends in Asia’s private credit market and the sector of major cryptocurrencies.

China Evergrande Group and China’s real estate sector had been on China’s headlines. In this report, we have summarized what has happened and the impact on China’s property sector. More importantly, we presented a solution to the listed company shareholders of Evergrande / other China real estate.

Traditional investors and institutions are demanding access and exposure to digital assets (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) as well as trading venues, custody, lending, and other financial services. In this volume, we explore the importance of working with a regulated partner in the digital asset space.

To dispel the perception that share pledge transactions have a negative impact on share prices for underlying securities, EquitiesFirst provides price performance data for all the transactions completed by EquitiesFirst in Asia up to April 2021. Our results were positive and remain in line with our previous findings.

Companies often use ESOP to align interests with their employees. Many early employees of listed companies have accumulated the majority of their wealth through stock rewards. When short-term capital needs arise, rather than selling those shares in the market (which creates share price pressure), pledging the shares to EquitiesFirst is an alternative for upside retention and alignment of interests.

The EquitiesFirst financing model requires a temporary title transfer of shares during the term of the loan transaction. We analyzed the share price performance of transactions completed by EquitiesFirst in Asia, address concerns about short interest, the cost of capital compared to margin lending and the benefits of our lending model.