John Packer


Simon Partridge


Michael Pay


Terry Rainback


David Smith


Ryan Smith


Martin Stanton Twitter deal wins our M&A Awards trophy


THE £25m sale of London-based social media platform TweetDeck to Twitter was named Small Deal of the Year at the national M&A Awards in London.


EMC sponsored the category and CEO Nik


Askaroff presented the trophy to TweetDeck’s Helen Moyes at the awards dinner held at the Millennium Mayfair Hotel. It is the third year that EMC has been involved with the M&A Awards - one of the biggest nights of the year for those involved in dealmaking in the UK. More than 350 CEOs, MDs, FDs, advisers,


venture capitalists and other fi nanciers attended the awards dinner which marked the culmination


of a challenging but fruitful year in the M&A mid- market.


The award-winning small deal made Iain Dodsworth, the 36-year-old founder of Twitter app TweetDeck, an overnight multimillionaire.


THE current bear market in corporate fi nance and M&A reminds me of the joke about two men being chased by a bear. One of the men goes to put on a pair of trainers. The other man says to him, “Why are you putting on a pair of trainers, you’ll never outrun a bear,” to which he replies, “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you!” In order to understand what that story has to do with mergers and acquisitions, you simply have to examine current market trends, recent surveys, buyers’ appetites and sellers’ expectations. The largest barrier to activity in the current M&A market is the difference in price expectations between vendor and acquirer. This is made worse when vendors misunderstand the motivation of buyers.


All too frequently vendors,


who are (very naturally) heavily emotionally involved with their


OUTRUNNING THE BEAR


By Anthony Ross, Head of Research, EMC


Corporate Finance


business, fail to recognise why it is not worth more to a potential purchaser who is driven by the business basics of cash fl ows, profi tability, prospects and prevailing market conditions. EMC overcomes these


problems for both purchaser and selling clients through careful mediation, clarifi cation of key issues, access to and provision of unbiased professional advice, and a clinical analysis of the future of the business post-transaction.


Many acquisitions fail to deliver full value to the acquiring company or best price to the seller because of poor pre- transaction analysis or post- transaction planning. It is all too easy, in the heat of battle and with the time pressures that naturally arise, to fail to recognise or properly address seemingly minor property, pensions and HR issues, for example, which can derail cost analyses and cause severe long-term problems to the post-acquisition company. So it’s important you choose your advisers carefully, especially in today’s diffi cult market. EMC has a long history of helping both buyers and sellers to maximise the value of their transactions. We will deliver the necessary rigorous, professional and dispassionate advice to support you throughout the hurly-burly of the negotiations and ensure that you outrun the bears!


PRIVATE EQUITY RECOVERY CONTINUES STRONGLY


THE lower mid-market represented the private equity success story of 2011, continuing its strong recovery to pre-recession levels of almost 100 deals, with UK aggregate buyout volumes and values increasing signifi cantly compared to the previous two years.


The segment’s robustness, despite macro-economic challenges, are highlighted in Lyceum Capital and Cass Business School’s UK Growth Buyout Dashboard which reveals a 44% leap in the total number of transactions last year to 91, compared to 63 in 2010 and 34 deals in 2009. The quarterly data, which analyses UK-headquartered


private equity control deals in the £10m to £100m enterprise value space, also shows that total deal value has more than trebled over the past three years with aggregate values in excess of £3.4bn last year compared to over £2.2bn in 2010 and just above £1bn in 2009. Technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) was the standout sector, a trend that is likely to continue, driven by growth in innovative IT solutions such as cloud computing and mobile business applications. Twenty-six TMT deals were completed in 2011 compared to 11 a year earlier and just four in 2009.


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