Valuation Service

September 2008. As the financial crisis closed over the markets, three people started a valuation firm in Hong Kong. They could not have known that the thing the market would soon want most was exactly the thing they had set out to build: a number that could stand up.

A valuation looks like arithmetic. It is not. It is an argument about the future — about growth, about risk, about what a buyer will believe on a Tuesday morning in a boardroom. The arithmetic is only how the argument gets written down.

That is the discipline. We build valuations on the market, income and cost approaches of the International Valuation Standards (IVS 2025) and the relevant IFRS/IAS requirements. Every engagement is led by a qualified director and reviewed for independence — not because the standards demand the formality, but because the people who will test the number will look for it.

The complication is that not every asset holds still long enough to be measured plainly. A convertible bond is part debt and part option; a derivative can turn on a volatility no one can observe. These are priced at fair value under IFRS 9 and IFRS 13, with the model chosen for the instrument rather than the reverse. Land is the opposite problem: it does not move, but the value of what stands on it does, and carrying value and market value part ways under HKAS 40 and HKAS 16.

A company, meanwhile, is worth what a buyer will believe about its future — nothing more. Building that belief means weighing the same three approaches against the standards a board and an auditor will apply, and then stating the basis, the method and the assumptions plainly enough to be challenged. It is the same whether the purpose is a transaction, an impairment, or a purchase-price allocation under ASC 805 / IFRS 3 and ASC 350 / IAS 36.

The point of a valuation is not the number. It is whether the number holds — in the boardroom, in the audit file, in front of the counterparty and the regulator. That is what independence and a director-led review are for. More than fifteen years on — and trusted by more than 400 leading corporations — the firm still begins every engagement the same way: not by calculating, but by asking what the number will have to survive.