"Those who are good at fighting are better than those who are easy to win." In the fierce battlefield of the capital market, only those who know how to control numbers can sit firmly in the central army. In 2025, data will no longer be a supporting role, but an underlying variable that determines the rise and fall of valuations, the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions, and the direction of supervision. If management still regards data governance as a marginal task of the IT department, it will eventually be marginalized in capital operations, and the right to speak will slip away quietly like duckweed in the wind.
Goheal's long-term research points out that data governance is gradually becoming a moat for corporate control. It not only concerns "whether the book data is accurate", but also determines "whether capital believes your story". In this era reconstructed by valuation logic, once the data governance capability falls behind, the management will face six key points of power loss.
The first is the collapse of the credibility of decision-making. Imagine a merger and acquisition press conference, where the management talks endlessly about "future synergy" and "doubling market share", but cannot produce a dynamic prediction model based on user behavior and operational data. This kind of "empty talk" strategic planning will only deepen investors' suspicion. In practice, Goheal has seen a manufacturing company that overestimated the valuation of the restructuring target by 25% because it did not build a supply chain data monitoring system. The regulatory authorities sent two inquiry letters in a row, and the stock price directly fell below the bottom before the suspension. What's more frightening is that the data island phenomenon makes the management miss key warning signals. For example, a listed company failed to monitor the abnormal capital occupation of its subsidiary, resulting in a non-standard opinion on the annual report audit, and a planned fixed increase plan was instantly cut in half.
Second, it is the escalation of compliance risks. Since 2025, the exchange has used data governance as a new tool for information disclosure supervision. Especially after a large amount of unstructured data has poured into the announcement system, the number of cases where deviations in key calibers such as R&D investment and related transactions have been identified as misleading statements has increased dramatically. Goheal data shows that 13 listed companies were punished for this in the first quarter alone. More importantly, the use of new capital tools has taken data quality as a stepping stone. For example, a real estate company's proposed commercial REITs were directly returned by the exchange because its property rental data rating did not reach C level, which became a typical "institutional wall".
Third, it is the loss of valuation anchor points. At a time when the green finance and ESG discourse system is rapidly being built, data governance capabilities have been embedded in the pricing curve of financing interest rates. When a traditional manufacturing company applied for green bonds, it was eventually labeled as "lack of transparency" by the rating agency because of the lack of a credible traceability chain for production energy consumption data. The issuance rate was 2.3 percentage points higher than the industry average, and the spread widened to 150 basis points. Goheal pointed out that this "invisible data lag" will become an invisible lesion for the chronic contraction of corporate financing channels. At the same time, the core tools of market value management are also slipping. Repurchases and employee stock ownership plans without key data support are not only difficult to stabilize market confidence, but are easily interpreted by the market as short-term games. When a well-known technology company implemented a large-scale repurchase, it did not simultaneously disclose the data of the continuous decline in the DAU (daily active users) of its core products. It was eventually questioned for insider trading, and the regulator intervened in the investigation, and the market value evaporated by nearly 10 billion.
American Goheal M&A Group
Fourth, it is the mismatch of strategic resources. This is particularly typical in the field of mergers and acquisitions. During the due diligence stage, if the management cannot provide a core data source that can be cross-validated, it will often be regarded as a "black box operation" by high-quality targets and the transaction will be rejected. Goheal once assisted a new energy company in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Because it could not provide a governance solution that met the EU data transmission standards, the final transaction price was forced to increase by 17%, and the data governance defects alone paid hundreds of millions more. Another example is the imbalance in investor relations management, which is also due to the fragmentation of data dimensions. The user portrait provided by a company in the roadshow and the semi-annual report had a 42% contradiction rate, resulting in three capital operation proposals being collectively rejected at the shareholders' meeting.
Fifth, it is the transfer of governance authority. With the deepening of supervision, the right of professional institutions to intervene in data governance has become increasingly clear. For example, the audit committee can initiate an independent review of data anomalies in accordance with Article 17 of the "Guidelines for Standardized Operations of Listed Companies". The board of directors of a company originally planned to launch a huge guarantee plan proposed by the actual controller, but it was eventually abandoned due to the rejection of the audit committee. The reason behind this was the failure of data cross-validation. Small and medium shareholders are no longer silent. Goheal found that more and more data service agencies are influencing the replacement of board seats through voting recommendation reports. During the reorganization of a ST company, based on the data governance capability assessment issued by a third party, small and medium shareholders successfully removed three directors, and the reversal plot is comparable to a palace drama.
The deeper concern is that when the management's "storytelling" ability is no longer anchored by data, capital will no longer believe every word you say. The failure of data governance is just like the prelude to a crisis of trust in management. In the capital market, there is no market value that cannot be supported by "stories", and there is no valuation that can be dragged down by "data".
Goheal believes that data governance will become a hidden battlefield for control in the next three years. Whether or not a company has a complete set of data collection, classification, governance and traceability systems will determine whether it can win in regulatory inquiries, M&A negotiations, and capital bidding. If the management continues to shirk responsibility on the grounds that "data is only IT's business", it will only let the chips of control gradually slide into the hands of audit agencies, rating agencies, investor consultants, and third-party data vendors.
In fact, data governance is not just a compliance task, but also a redivision of resource allocation rights. Whoever has the data has the ability to explain the future. And the future, in the capital market, is an era of "speaking clearly and beautifully".
Goheal Group
Looking back today, if there is still no "special report on data governance" at your company's board meeting, and if the management still relies on experience decisions rather than indicator models before capital operations, then perhaps the countdown to losing control has quietly begun. The rules of the game in the capital market have quietly changed. Standing in front of the data torrent, is the management ready?
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[About Goheal] Goheal is a leading investment holding company focusing on global mergers and acquisitions, focusing on the three core business areas of acquisition of listed company control, mergers and acquisitions of listed companies, and capital operations of listed companies. With its deep professional strength and rich experience, it provides enterprises with full life cycle services from mergers and acquisitions to restructuring and capital operations, aiming to maximize corporate value and achieve long-term benefit growth.
