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.
