You spend months on it. Due diligence. The legal fees. The negotiations. The late nights running scenarios. Then FIRB knocks it back. The ACCC raises concerns. The buyer walks on financing. A material adverse change gets invoked. Whatever the reason, the deal is dead.
And now you’re sitting on a business, or a set of business assets, that were mid-transition when everything stopped.
This is the moment almost nobody writes a playbook for. Every M&A advisor, every investment bank, every law firm has a process for getting deals done. Very few have a clear answer for what happens when they don’t specifically, what you do with the physical assets caught in the middle.
In Australia’s current deal environment, it’s a question that’s coming up more often than people would like to admit.
Australian M&A had a resilient 2025. Around 1,132 deals were completed, the total deal value climbed to A$143.7 billion, and momentum is carrying into 2026. On paper, conditions look constructive: interest rates stabilising, private capital abundant, international appetite for Australian assets strong.
But underneath that headline activity is a growing structural risk: more deals are being blocked, delayed, or abandoned before completion than at any point in recent memory.
The reason is regulation. From 1 January 2026, Australia moved to a mandatory and suspensory merger control regime under the ACCC, the most significant overhaul of merger laws in over 50 years. Under the old system, most deals moved through voluntarily. Under the new one, qualifying transactions must obtain ACCC clearance before proceeding. The review periods are longer. The documentation requirements are heavier. And the ACCC now has the power to scrutinise any deal in a designated high-risk sector.
Combine that with FIRB delays on foreign investment, already a known pressure point in 2025, with the Cosette/Mayne Pharma deal a prominent casualty, and you have a deal environment where execution risk has materially increased. More deals will be announced. Some won’t close. And the assets caught in those failed transactions need somewhere to go.
Here’s how it typically plays out. A company agrees to sell a division, a plant, or its entire operations. In anticipation of the deal, it may have already begun winding down parts of the business, reducing headcount, allowing leases to expire, and not replacing ageing equipment. The business is, in effect, in transition.
When the deal falls through, that transition doesn’t reverse cleanly. You don’t just switch back to business as usual. You’re left with assets that were already, mentally and sometimes operationally, out the door.
If it’s a carve-out or divestiture that’s collapsed, there may be standalone equipment, inventory, or infrastructure that was never part of the retained business to begin with. If it’s an inbound acquisition that’s been blocked, the Australian target may have made commitments or structural changes based on the assumption that the deal would close.
In every case, the same question surfaces: what are these assets actually worth right now, in this market, sold the right way and who is going to maximise that value?
The blocked acquisition. A foreign buyer has had their FIRB or ACCC clearance refused. The Australian target, which had been preparing for integration, is now independently operated again, often with assets that need to be rationalised, revalued, or redeployed. Lenders who supported the deal process on the assumption of a change of ownership need updated valuations. Boards need to understand what the balance sheet actually looks like in the absence of the transaction premium.
The collapsed divestiture. A corporation has been trying to sell a non-core division or manufacturing plant. The buyer falls away, financing gap, due diligence finding, strategic change of heart. The assets that were packaged for sale now sit in limbo. The longer they sit, the more value they lose. The right move isn’t to restart the sale process from scratch; it’s to understand the current market value and activate a disposal strategy before the asset base deteriorates further.
The private equity exit that doesn’t close. A PE sponsor has been running a dual-track or sale process for a portfolio company. The preferred buyer exits the process. The assets, plant, equipment, inventory, and fleet need to be assessed, valued, and either redeployed into the portfolio or monetised through the most effective channel available. Timing matters. So does the global buyer reach.
The instinct after a failed deal is to pause to take stock, regroup, and figure out the next step. That instinct is understandable. But for physical assets, pausing costs money. Every week that plant sits idle, every month that inventory ages on a shelf, is value leaving the table.
The businesses that recover the most from a failed transaction move quickly on two things.
First, they get an independent, current valuation of the physical assets, not the book value, not the figure that appeared in the deal documentation, but what those assets are actually worth in today’s market, under current conditions, to a real buyer. That number becomes the anchor for every decision that follows: whether to hold, redeploy, or sell, and through what channel.
Second, they activate a monetisation strategy that fits the asset class. A failed acquisition doesn’t mean a fire sale. It means a managed, considered approach to extracting maximum value from each asset category, equipment, inventory, fleet, infrastructure, matched to the buyer pool most likely to pay the most for it. That might be a domestic auction, a targeted international remarketing campaign, a private treaty sale, or a direct acquisition. The right answer depends on the asset and the market, not on urgency or desperation.
Hilco APAC’s Advisory and Monetisation teams have worked through some of the most complex asset situations in the APAC region, including the aftermath of failed transactions, collapsed divestitures, and abandoned restructures.
Our Valuation & Diligence team provides independent, defensible valuations of tangible assets that give boards, lenders, and advisors a clear picture of what they’re actually working with. Our monetisation capability connects those assets with a global network of over 2 million buyers across 26 countries, so value isn’t limited by what the local market will pay.
If you’re a restructuring advisor managing the aftermath of a broken deal, a private equity sponsor with assets that need to be redeployed or realised, or a business that’s just watched months of deal work unravel, we can move fast, with the expertise to get the most out of what’s left.
Deals fall through. Assets don’t have to. Talk to our Advisory team today.
Have an excess, obsolete or returned stock challenge? Talk to us.
Rochelle has forged a career as a Retail inventory specialist over 18 years across auctions, marketplaces, eCommerce and Retail, locally and internationally. Having worked for both high growth start-ups and Australia’s largest retail corporations, Rochelle has seen the myriad of challenges faced by Retailers in complex inventory environments.
As Director, Wholesale at Hilco Global, Rochelle translates this expertise in buying, sourcing and trading, offering clients strategies that can be deployed immediately in solving inventory challenges at scale.
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