Folks, there have been quite a few discussions on distressed funds and how these funds operate / seek to gain control and profit from deals. The thing is, it appears a lot of the mechanics to gain control rely on strength of the local regulatory landscape, and it can get pretty murky in Asia. Given this, do distressed funds use different strategies or operate differently in Asia than in the US?
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Would second the post above. Market is divided by geography/legal regime - the largest ones will be India (mostly Indian local firms working there), SEA (Indonesia esp energy), HK/China (esp real estate). HK/China is the region with the largest bond market, but the legal system in China make it tricky. HK listed securities likely still have underlying assets in China, governed by Chinese law - hard to do collateral analysis when your assets and rights are in a legal regime that doesn't have an analyzable legal system; people don't have a lot of appetite underwriting these given the lack of ability to do legal analysis.
Overall, believe the depth of legal analysis, and the accompanying depth of restructuring analysis is much shallower there. Either you are comfortable taking those risks because of who you/your funds/LPs are, or you invest more like a HY bond investor (rather than distressed investor). Some have tried to buy undervalued asset and then operate it, but most of these focused on real assets (real estate, etc.) and are more excel-driven and involve less business/strategy/operations thinking. Skillset trained in these markets are not directly transferable to US/UK - you'd have to learn that anew; though I'd argue that's the case for distressed investing in general - it's not easily transferable across regions given the amount of legal analysis involved.
Also, if I were an LP and looking to allocate to Asia distressed fund, I'd favor local players rather than Asian arms of global funds - relationship and actual experience dealing with local systems is a much more important skillset than "analysis", given the limited amount of analysis that can be performed