Where to find updated research on M&A
As announced in early 2011, this blog is no longer being updated. My current commentary and research on mergers and acquisitions can now be found on the Cass Business School website both on my own pages in CassExperts and in the pages for the M&A Research Centre.
2011 in review: Intelligent Mergers Blog
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many...
2010 in review: Intelligent Mergers Blog
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and they provided me with this high level summary of its overall blog health (this is their data and words, not mine, but I thought it might be interesting to the regular readers of this blog): The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than...
2011 M&A Forecast
As every year, I would like to start the new year with some thoughts about the M&A volume for the coming year. I’ll be upfront about my outlook for 2011: it will be better than 2010, which itself was better than 2009. See below: There’s a lot of interesting things about the chart above. Most...
M&A Maturity Index — Emerging markets for M&A
If you want to expand overseas — from whatever your base — what do you do? Start up new in a country in which you’ve never operated before? Maybe a joint venture? Do a big acquisition there? If you’ve decided that an acquisition is the best route forward, then you have the big decision to...
Deal code names
One of the more interesting discussions in any deal is at the beginning when you need to decide what the confidential name should be for the project. This is needed because at that time the deal is very hush-hush secretive with few people knowing about the potential takeover or merger. Should the information about the...
What do Hostile Deals tell us?
The rise of hostile deals. Again. What does this mean? There was an interesting comment reported by Bloomberg in an interview with Steven Koch, the co-chairman of M&A at Credit Suisse (the video of the interview is here). He said the following: If you look over the last several booms that have gone on over...
M&A Hype: Has the market turned?
Readers of this blog know that I do not usually try to predict the M&A market. I like to look at longer-term trends, trying to identify the drivers for the next merger wave and seeking to provide some guidance on what will make it turn upwards. I continue to insist that M&A is a confidence...
The Wall Street Journal on why CEO’s do M&A deals quickly after being appointed
There’s been a lot of press reaction to our recent report on what happens when a new CEO takes over: ‘Here’s the deal: move fast as a new CEO’. The report was written by Cass Business School and the M&A Research Centre (MARC) (which I head). See also my blog entry ‘What comes next? Change your...
Due Diligence Requirements in M&A Deals
In QFinance, a very extensive on-line financial markets resource, I’ve written an article entitled ‘Due Diligence Requirements in Financial Transactions‘. Due diligence is a critical business intelligence process, and in our book on the use of business intelligence in doing M&A deals better (Intelligent M&A, Navigating the Mergers and Acquisitions Minefield), the chapter on due...
M&A Forecast for 2010 — update
Well, we’ve got more than one quarter of the year gone. Is it really possible to see more clearly how 2010 will develop for the M&A markets? I think so, and one reason is the behavioural aspects of the market that cause it to be ‘sticky’, as discussed several weeks ago in an article I...
Current Research and Information on Mergers & Acquisitions