In this book, the mysteries of the new 'Asian definition of project finance' have been unravelled, the richness and complexities of the constantly-evolving efforts have been explored, and contrasts the Asian adapted definition with the basic model of the West.While the book reviews the past and outlines the future for project financing in Asia, the focus is on the 'premature present', a period of seven to eight years from the late '80's to 1996, when there were few successes and countless casualties. This interval in time has been sought to provide the reader, through a temporal window, a glimpse of what it was like in this 'Age of Arbitrage' on a project financing front, armed with neither a reliable legal/regulatory framework, nor an efficient pricing mechanism. The book journeys through the short-lived victories and the morale-breaking defeats, documenting the war of attrition as the remaining players survive to traverse down the road towards a more mature and understandable project financing future.
The book begins by providing a background to project finance in Part I, including the basic project financing model and its evaluation method. It also discusses the difficulties and challenges encountered on the Asian project financing front by presenting our ideas, and then drawing upon various comparisons with Western practices to highlight the differences of project finance in Asia. In Part II, through two very distinct cases in their mentality of using debt, it presents how various firms and projects adapt to various issues, thereby revealing the winning combinations as well as the recipes for failure. A mass of detailed information has been accumulated on several cases in the data collection, Part III acts as a forum for the exchange of ideas between finance theorists and practitioners. The book presents in-depth studies of power projects while testing them against accepted theories such as what constitutes an optimal project structure, and whether, or why they hold true in the practical world. And finally, in Part IV the book presents several specialized cases which may provide different views on project finance in Asia. All discoveries have been incorporated into a new Asian model of project finance, and a conclusion summarizes all findings. With the help of the above framework, the book aims to 'Asianize' the traditional definition of project finance and to provide the reader with a greater understanding of this not-very-well-understood subject.
