Hello, welcome to a special edition of Emlex's regulatory podcast. I'm James Panicki, Asia Pacific Senior Editor, and we're hitting your feed this week to talk about our special report covering

the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on competition. Indeed the report is titled

Competition Concerns in the time of COVID-19 and the report is up on our website, mlexmarketing

site.com and is ready to be downloaded. Broadly, the report covers the regulatory response to the pandemic in areas of antitrust,

M&A and state subsidy policies.

Our reporters around the world have been weighing up what parts of the response are likely

to remain in place over coming months and what the lasting effects of the pandemic are likely to be.

There's too much in the report to summarise in a humble podcast, so today I've chosen just a few

of the areas that we've covered and we'll drill down on those issues with three of our reporters.

We'll look at the controversial M&A measures adopted in the Philippines

as a result of COVID-19. We'll also look at how antitrust enforcement in the European Union has

been affected. First, though, we'll take a look at the pandemic's impact on mergers and acquisitions

in the US. To do that, I'm joined by Curtis Eichelberger, who covers M&A for us from

Washington, D.C., although he's dialing in today from Philadelphia. Curtis, firstly, how has the

market's reaction to COVID-19 changed since the Northern Hemisphere Spring? Well, companies

looking to be acquired earlier this year

were either overwhelmed by the emergence of COVID-19

and just trying to stay in business,

concerned about furlowing their employees,

you know, working at a distance,

or they were, you know, largely left struggling

to justify their valuations.

...