Visualizing Every Overseas Chinese Investment Over $100 Million

The global reach of the world’s most populous country has grown exponentially over the last decade. China’s thirst for assets in metals, energy, agriculture, and other sectors is reflected in today’s post.

In the above data visualization, every attempted Chinese merger and acquisition (M&A) overseas over $100 million is sorted by country and industry. Showing over 1,250 attempted transactions (excluding bonds), this list includes both successful and failed attempts in order to help visualize the ebb and flow of Chinese investments up until mid-2014.

This fantastic data was compiled and visualized by South China Morning Post, and there is an even better interactive version hosted on their site. Click image for large interactive version... [3]

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Source: Visual Capitalist [5]

The largest successful transaction was in 2012, when state-owned
CNOOC bought Canadian oil and gas giant Nexen for $15.1 billion. With
the crash in energy prices, just years later the Chinese parent company
is looking at enormous writedowns exceeding $5 billion on its Nexen
assets.

Chinalco, the world’s second largest alumina miner, bid
for some of Rio Tinto’s assets in 2008 in what would be the second
largest M&A transaction on the list, but the deal eventually fell
through.

Chinese investments rose over 50% in the United States from 2012, hitting a high of over $14 billion in 2014.