Should you do an IPO or M&A deal now?
There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether the IPO markets have re-opened. IPOs have been announced, but also many retracted as well (note the withdrawal on 10 February of Blackstone’s Travelport and, one day later, Merlin offerings, followed a few days later by Permira’s and Apax’s withdrawal of New Look). Now, it...
M&A market not doing as badly as you think
Where have all the mega-deals gone? There’s certainly been a dearth of deals since year-end. It’s been a long time since I’ve opened up the newpaper in the morning and seen any front-page headlines about a new deal. In fact, it’s been more about cancelled deals (IPOs such as New Look, Travelport and Merlin) or...
M&A Volumes were up, but what’s happened?
Typically, the volume of deals in the first quarter of the year are higher than at other times of the year. In fact, if you look at the largest deals since the mid-1990′s (all around $60 billion or more),over one-third of them were announced in January and almost half in the first quarter. Obviously, we...
Mergers & Acquisitions and Behavioural Finance
I’ve not seen much discussion of the behavioural finance aspects of M&A, so it was refreshing to see this noted in a recent article in Q6, the publication in Fall 2009 of the Yale School of Management (full disclosure: I am a graduate of the charter class of that school). In that article entitled ‘What...
Symmetry of M&A in the last Decade (2000-2009)
The first decade of the new millennium is over. Happy New Year everyone! So along with so many other observers of the financial markets, I would like to comment on the past ten years. Some of these comments have appeared elsewhere – and in fact from me as a number of publications have asked me...
Worst Mergers or Acquisitions of all Time
With the year-end coming, there’s lots of talk about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of not just the past year, but the first decade of the new millenium. Naturally, this talk then moves to which deal was THE worst in either 2009 or the period from 2000 to 2009.
I’ve certainly discussed this...
Measuring M&A Deal Success
How do you measure M&A deal success?
This has certainly been the focus of many studies, whether in academia or amongst practitioners. We’ve looked at it here on this blog (‘What is success in an M&A deal?‘) and also in our book (Intelligent M&A: Navigating the mergers and acquisitions minefield).
It was thus with great interest...
2010 M&A Forecast
It’s December and the M&A market is mostly closed for the year. This isn’t the month when many deals are done (although I would love to be surprised by a big announcement in the next several weeks, it would be a surprise!). We’ve discussed this recently here, where we showed that it is rare for...
Where have all the M&A mega-deals gone?
I was asked the other day whether I thought that mega-deals have disappeared for a while, because not many have been announced recently. The commentary on M&A in the press is still focussed on the Kraft / Cadbury / Hershey / etc deal that was announced back in September (here’s the original press statement from...
M&A and Strategic Change
Dr Robert Davies, in his fascinating blog on strategy (see weblink at the bottom of this page in the blogroll or check it out here), has written an interesting article on what he sees as the eight major issues that will drive corporate strategy and behaviour over the next several years (see his blog: ‘2010...
What next in M&A?
An excellent study was issued by IntraLinks and mergermarket a few weeks ago. (You can find it here.) In August and September, they conducted a survey of experts in M&A – the people within each company responsible for deals. The key finding: almost two-thirds of those surveyed thought that the overall economic environment in their...
‘Upside Risk’ in M&A