New level for Asian M&A

There's not a whole lot more to say about the Alibaba.com/Yahoo deal which hasn't been said already. It's a rare B2B deal in Asia that makes it into the specialist press yet alone the front page of all major news media.

We have plugged the numbers into our tracking of M&A and investments in business and specialist media in the region and, of course, it blows everything else off the charts (click on the chart below to see it more clearly):

For the record, the new deal takes the total value of deals in the region since we've been watching (1997) up to $1,418.8mn. The average size deal is now $35.5 million. Of the 40 deals tracked, 10 have been in the data/online sector, now the largest we track, although the other 9 deals totaled only around $50 million between them. The bar has been very dramatically raised!