Associated Planners abandons Asia push
Associated Planners Financial Services(APFS) has abandoned an expansion push into Asia after discussions with its Singaporean joint-venture partner failed to justify the group opening a financial planning/advisory business in the Republic.
According to APFS managing director Ray Miles the stalling of the negotiations, reported byMoney Managementback in September, and the eventual abandoning of the deal were due to insufficient cost-benefits to the group, particularly given APFS’ strong domestic growth.
“We don’t really want to mess up our Australian business for an equity stake in an overseas business in a partnership that I don’t think we will ever be able to crystallise value from,” Miles says.
Miles said yesterday the decision to call off the deal was APFS’, and that the group had alerted its potential Asian joint venture partner in a recent letter.
“The issue was it was starting to stretch our resources and take our focus off Australia, and it was taking up a fair bit of time. We’re growing so rapidly in Australia that we got to the stage of thinking ‘why are we doing this?’”
Miles says the group is likely to reconsider a push into Asia, but says it won’t be for some time and is likely to be into Hong Kong as the Singaporean market was relatively “immature”.
“I’m not saying we won’t go into Singapore in the future but when we do we’ll go in a lot older and wiser.”
“We’d probably look at Hong Kong next time as Singapore is a small market and we’d be putting a lot of time and effort into a very small market. It’s a very immature market as far as financial planning goes and I guess we’d like it to be a little more advanced before we consider entering. They’re basically at the stage we were back in the 80s,” Miles says.
While clearly disappointed at the deal falling over, Miles remains philosophical about the whole experience, as he says “it’s just one of those things”.
“We’ve got a good model and we’d like to do something with it overseas but to do so it really needs to be on our terms.”
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