Title : Senior Partner, Pakpoom Vallisuta, 26 February 2013 interview in the South East Asia Infrastructure Magazine, on M&A in ASEAN countries
Date : February,26 2013

The global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market was impacted by a number of factors last year. This included the Eurozone crisis and the general slowdown of developed and emerging economies. However, Southeast Asia remained a hotspot for M&As. In an interview with Southeast Asia Infrastructure, Pakpoom Vallisuta, Chairman and Senior Partner, The Quant Group, an investment bank specializing in M&As, pointed out that the value of M&A deals in Southeast Asia in 2012 was $89.4 billion: this figure constituted 4 and 20 per cent of the M&A deals globally and in Asia, respectively. He further stated that of the 10 countries in the ASEAN, economic activities and M&A deals were essentially concentrated in the six countries of Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Title : LOST 3.0: Japan’s Quest for an End-Game by Ratchatawan Mahasaranond and Dan Gallucci
Date : December,09 2011

Civil wars are invariably directional or sectarian: Left versus Right, West versus East, North versus South. But in Japan they have always been about Old versus New. This seems to have been the case since time immemorial, during the Meiji Restoration and the ways of the Samurai. This very point of ways is critical: the Japanese too often seem to be more concerned about the means rather than the ends. Put another way: no clarity in the end-game.

Title : The Globalization of M&A by Pakpoom Vallisuta
Date : August,02 2011

In the movie "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps", Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko spoke to a university classroom and he said: "Someone reminded me I once said greed is good. Now it seems its legal." To encapsulate the development of M&A over the past twenty years, my lame attempt is: "M&A used to be Anglo-Saxon, now it seems it's global."

Title : Anatomy Of A Black Swan: The Last Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back. By Pakpoom Vallisuta and Sai Waisiriroaj
Date : September,17 2010

"The market crash on 19th October 1997 was 27-standard-deviation event," with a probability of 1 out of 10160: "Even if one were to have lived through the entire 20 billion year life1 of the universe and experienced this 20 billion times (20 billion Big Bangs), that such a decline could have happened even once in this period is a virtual impossibility."

Title : Riding The Alternative Energy Wave, Money and Wealth Magazine (May 2010 issue), by Jirasee Kasuwan
Date : May,01 2010

Alternative energy is to traditional energy what homeopathy is to the medical industry. You may pop an Echinacea to help fight off the common cold but if you’ve caught the H1N1, you better go to see a doctor. Whether you’re going to pop alternative energy into your gas tank or turn it on in light bulbs will by and large depends on: 1. Cost parity to classical energy; 2. Subsidies; and 3. Government fiat.

Title : Creative Capitalism by Napalak Waisiriroaj
Date : April,09 2010

I'm not sure who exactly was the first person to have used the term Creative Capitalism but the first time I heard it coined was by Bill Gates in Davos in January 2008. And since then it has been used somewhat loosely in other derivative forms such as Creative Capital and Creative Fund and have even seeped into the IT side of Creative Economy which is altogether a different thing. Albeit Gate's background being in IT and how he has all along been associated with a vibrant and creative company - Microsoft - that he founded and built into a US$260 billion market capitalization company, Bill Gates meant none in that IT context when he spoke about Creative Capitalism.

Title : ChiNext - The New NASDAQ?, Money & Wealth Magazine, by Thananchai Sajjaporamest and Sarocha Minesuk
Date : April,01 2010

In Poker, the odds of being dealt a hand of a Straight Flush is about 0.0015%, that is, forty possible Straight Flushes over roughly two-point-six million permutations. If you get one of those hands and nobody else does then you take your winnings which works out to be about 4-5 times your capital. Of course one can win with other less impressive hands insofar as your opponents' hands are worse than yours and therefore the odds of a winning hand is one out of the number of total players. Every year about 15 million mainland Chinese commute the ocean via hovercrafts known as TurboJET to Macau to attempt this feat. Now they don't even have to cross the ocean: they can simply go to Shenzhen Stock Exchange and bet on stocks on the ChiNext board. On first day, all 28 new stocks on ChiNext went up between 76%-210% higher than their IPO prices.

Title : Duke MBA Asian Business Club - Alumni News Letter
Date : April,01 2010

Featured Alum: Pakpoom Vallisuta
Chairman, The Quant Group
Pakpoom is the Chairman of The Quant Group, a pan-Asian Mergers & Acquisitions advisory firm. He holds an MBA from Duke University and is also a board member of the Board of Visitors at The Fuqua School of Business. Pakpoom currently teaches Investment Banking and Finance for the MBA program at Assumption University, Thailand, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the business schools at Harvard, Duke, The University of Chicago, Wharton, and MIT.
Link: http://mbaa.fuqua.duke.edu/aabc/documents/ABCNewsLetter.pdf

Title : Private Equity in the Energy Sector by Thananchai Sajjaporamest
Date : November,01 2009

Investing in commodities has always been beneath private equity funds. LBO bankers are quick to use words like commoditization and commodities in a depreciative manner citing that commodities are commonplace and do not provide differentiation. Therefore, profiting from commodities is done purely through price because there is no value-additive in pure commodities.

Title : Thailand’s Big Bang, Money&Wealth Magazine by Daechapon Lersuwanaroj
Date : April,01 2009

Building demolition experts know this well: it only takes a few sticks of dynamites in the right places to bring down a tall building. It?s all about structure. It’s not even that loud. Poof! And the building crumbles into tiny rocks and dusts.