M&A intelligence: read your competitors’ strategy in deals

Press releases announce, deals decide

Your competitors’ strategies cannot be read in their public statements. They can be read in their acquisitions, disposals and financings. By seeing who buys and who sells, you understand the market’s real movements, not just its declared intentions.

Seeing who does deals means seeing where competition is played out. It is also the starting point for turning that visibility into relationships, and those relationships into mandates.

What a deal log should contain

A useful log continuously aggregates the acquisitions, disposals and financings completed in your sectors and target countries: LBOs, build-ups, venture capital, IPOs. For each transaction, it shows the parties involved, the date, the country and the context of the deal.

It can be filtered and sorted column by column: dates, acquirers, targets, headcount, countries, sectors. That is what makes repeat acquirers stand out immediately, the ones who come back line after line in your sector.

Fig. 1The deal log. Sorted and filtered, the log brings repeat acquirers to the surface. Illustrative data.

Five strategic readings of a market

Beyond the list, market analysis rests on five complementary readings.

Pace of consolidation: volumes per period show whether the sector is accelerating, slowing or changing hands.
Size of acquired targets: it locates the core of the market; the ratio between acquirer size and target size shows who is buying whom.
Most active acquirers: the ranking of buyers and sellers shows who is consolidating and who is diversifying.
Their backers: the banks and funds behind your competitors show who is supporting their strategy.
Advisory ecosystem: the lawyers, auditors and M&A advisors active in the sector trace the channels through which mandates circulate.

Fig. 2Five readings of a market. The five angles of a sector’s strategic analysis.

Country by country: see the consolidators coming

Geographic trends complete the picture. A consolidator active in a neighbouring country may become the next entrant in your market, or the acquirer of one of your competitors. Seeing it coming means tracking deals country by country, across every country that matters to you.

This puts an end to monitoring scattered across multiple sources and to late discoveries in the press. You no longer find out about your sector’s M&A news after the fact: you see it taking shape, and you can anticipate.

From dashboard to strategy committee

Picture your next strategy committee. You no longer present a list of opportunities received through inbound solicitations, but a precise reading of your market: the deals completed this quarter, the acquirers consolidating, the sellers getting ready. And for each one, the professionals who did the deal.

You then know who to talk to, what to talk about, and why that person holds the information you are looking for. The same reading underpins the approach to owners: it is what lets you say “your sector is consolidating, and here is who is buying”, as explained in Direct approach.

You know who to talk to, what to talk about, and why that person holds the information you are looking for.