The number of blank-check companies focused on developing countries has almost tripled in 2021 as investors look for better value overseas.
Blank-check companies are venturing to far-flung locales such as Brazil, Israel and Turkey to find attractive merger targets these days.
Special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, explicitly pursuing companies in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa remain a small part of the overall market. But they are growing at a faster clip than their conventional counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of data from SPAC Research.
Sixty new SPACs focused on emerging markets filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the first half of 2021, almost triple the number for all of 2020, according to the analysis. The number of non-emerging-market SPACs grew by about 67% to 515 over the same period.
The surge coincides with mounting competition that has driven up purchase prices, and a selloff that has buffeted the U.S. SPAC market in recent months.
SPACs are shell firms that raise money on stock exchanges, then merge with private companies and take them public. With so-manybuyers chasing dealsin the U.S., blank-check companies are more likely to overpay or to purchase speculative businesses because they must close deals within two years of launching or give investors their money back. The bidding wars have grown so heated that Wall Street insiders have taken to calling them SPAC-offs.
“People are finding two Stanford dropouts with a twinkle in their eye and a plan to colonize Venus and giving them $2 billion,” said Daniel Freifeld, founder of Callaway Capital Management LLC, a money manager focused on emerging markets.
Callaway completed a $125 million SPAC in July that listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is targeting Turkish financial-technology companies.
Turkey is a prime example of the risks that foreign investors take playing in developing markets. Political instability, high inflation and erratic monetary policy have sent the country’s stock market andcurrency into a tailspindespite the global economic recovery this year. The Turkey BIST 100 stock index lost 5.2% in 2021 through Aug. 2, making it the third-worst performer of the global benchmark indexes listed by FactSet.
“Nowhere in the world is cheaper than Turkey right now,” Mr. Freifeld said Still, the country’s banks and insurance companies are well capitalized and its young population is underbanked, creating strong growth prospects for the financial sector, according to Mr. Freifeld, who says Turkish assets are unlikely to fall much further.
Most SPACs focused on emerging markets list on U.S. stock exchanges, where relatively stringent reporting and regulatory requirements give investors comfort, said Matthew Simpson, managing partner at WealthSpring Capital, which has about $750 million it invests in SPACs. They also give SPAC investors a way to reduce concentration in the U.S., where lofty valuations andwarnings from regulatorshave recently sparkeda sharp selloff.
“We actually like adding a lot of foreign-focused SPACs in our portfolio because it adds diversity,” Mr. Simpson said.