High interest rates have contributed to record low private equity deal volumes. Faced with steep borrowing costs, PE firms are focusing on maximising value from portfolio companies.

Dozens of Chinese companies, from leading tech giants to new entrants, have jumped on the LLM bandwagon in the wake of ChatGPT’s public release a year ago. Meanwhile, local financial institutions and fintech companies have been encouraged to share how they weave AI or Gen-AI technologies in their internal workflow, products, and services. How has the new revolutionary technology affected data space in China in the past year? This intelligence report summarises our on-the-ground findings.

The recent ESG backlash has led to increased scrutiny of the major ratings agencies. Rampant greenwashing and confusion over what ESG ratings actually measure have raised some difficult questions and highlighted the need to better quantify ESG performance and impact. By integrating alternative datasets, investors can capture an outside-in perspective of ESG performance that reduces the bias in ESG scores and mitigates greenwashing. This report provides an overview of third-party datasets that can help investors compare ESG disclosures with material sustainability performance.

The tracking of corporate jets continues to develop as a data category. We’ve seen an uptick in client numbers, decreased prices and an increase in the coverage and overall capabilities of data providers in this space. As a result of datasets becoming more sophisticated in this space, certain providers have emerged as a must-have dataset for jet-tracking investors. In this piece, we outline incumbent datasets that are popular with investors as well as free and paid alternatives. We also highlight some limitations that investors may face when using these datasets.

We outline the key datasets available to monitor the industrials sector, highlighting datasets better suited for quantitative and fundamental strategies. The sub-sectors in focus are machinery/heavy equipment, building materials, transportation and chemicals.

The world has changed over the past two years, when we last discussed dependencies and disruptions in global supply chains. Since then, pandemic-induced lockdowns have become a thing of the past (touch wood), but tensions between the US and China have increased and war has broken out in Europe, sparking broad sanctions against Russia. As global supply chains remain strained, we examine how alternative data can be used to map and assess these sprawling links.

Last year, we observed that the POS alternative data market lacks products with a consolidated market view across diverse channels and product types. We predicted that a wave of mergers would arise to offer solution to this structural shortcoming. A year later, we can confidently state our prediction on increased merger activity was accurate. That said, the market today remains far from mature. In this report, we summarise the activity we’ve observed in the POS data landscape across 2023.

South Korean ecommerce platforms have experienced a surge in business during the past three years as consumer transactions have shifted online. This includes new platforms, emerging in the wake of the pandemic, that threaten to disrupt the existing ecommerce champions. In this report, we explore alternative datasets that help in understanding the ecommerce industry in South Korea, as well as the shifts in the country’s overall retail landscape.

We return to an alternative data sector that consistently interests our readers – healthcare. In this report, we pull together all the healthcare resources on our platform to revisit key vendors, highlight common use cases and introduce new vendors, while also re-examining the sector from a compliance perspective.

In 2019, Forbes said the race to deploy 5G reflected a geopolitical rivalry that would determine political and economic fortunes for decades. Amid rising tensions between the US and China, Donald Trump declared “the race to 5G is a race that America must win”. Fast-forwarding to today, we outline the real 5G timeline, reasons for the slow rollout and alternative datasets that investors can use to monitor the space.