Roar of the East being heard

New Asian players are gearing up to dominate the global corporate stage

When Chinese automaker Geely paid $1.8 billion for Swedish automobile giant Volvo in 2010, it represented another successful step-up by an Asian company onto the global corporate stage.

Geely's move helped it bypass one of those essential stages in corporate expansion, namely brand building and market recognition, by simply buying an established global company.

It is not an isolated case but a developing trend. It has been estimated that by 2025 around 45 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies will be Asian — many of them from China.

The corporate landscape worldwide is changing and businesses from developing countries including China are showing they too can play at the game of mergers and acquisitions.

Not mere vanity but cold calculations are at work in this process.

"It makes sense," Ying Zhu, director of the Australian Centre for Asian Business at the University of South Australia, says. "No one outside China had ever heard of the automaker Geely before it took over Volvo."

The Hangzhou-based carmaker was acquiring not only a brand, but also Volvo's technology and skilled workforce. The Swedish firm too had a lot to gain.

"For Volvo, the door opened to a massive domestic market in China," Zhu says. "So for both sides it was win-win. It gave Geely a recognized global brand and a luxury-end brand it could take to its domestic market. For Volvo, it meant survival."