What sits behind the buyer, and what it is not.

Arete is a buyer. We acquire one Singapore business and operate it. We are not an adviser, a broker, or an intermediary.

What sits behind us is a bench: leadership of listed-company transactions across Asia, operating businesses built across nine cities, and a direct operating channel into Japan. That experience is not a service we sell. It is what the company inherits on the day we take ownership.

What the bench is for

It is for one company, the one we buy. In practice that means four things.

• Capital structure. A company of this size usually banks the way it has always banked. Someone who has led financing for a listed group will ask different questions of the same lender.
• Hiring. The most common failure after a succession sale is not commercial. It is that the founder was the operating system, and no one built the layer beneath him.
• Acquisition discipline. Buying a smaller competitor is the fastest route to scale in a fragmented trade, and the fastest route to destroying a good business if done without discipline.
• The Japan channel. A working operating relationship with a Japanese group, held by a principal rather than a consultant. Japanese counterparties are slow to open and slow to leave, which is exactly the wrong combination for a company approaching them cold and the right one for a company arriving with an introduction.