New | Explosion of cross-border M&As in China compels Merrill Corp to set up regional data centre in Hong Kong

The rising tide of international mergers and acquisitions by mainland Chinese companies has led Merrill Corp, one of the world’s largest providers of virtual data room services, to establish its Asia-Pacific data centre in Hong Kong.

Virtual data rooms are secure online repositories of information used by businesses for the due diligence process related to mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, regulatory compliance and other fundraising exercises.

Nancy Yu, the managing director for Merrill in Asia-Pacific, said the launch of its new data centre in Hong Kong would provide improved performance, in terms of online access time and speed, for its virtual data room service across the region.

“The phenomenal increase in cross-border mergers and acquisitions activity by mainland Chinese companies made it important for us to locate our DataSite facility in Hong Kong,” Yu said. “We used to host data in the United States.”

Privately-held Merrill, which is based in Minnesota, estimated that it has conducted more than 35,000 virtual data room projects worldwide since it started offering the service in 2003.

Before this service became widely available from different providers, Yu said mergers and acquisitions transactions typically had representatives of potential buyers physically inspect for days all the relevant data of the seller.