Brochures

Year End Review 2011

After a strong start the first half of 2011, the M&A market has been negatively influenced by the uncertainty of the Eurozone recovery programs and the related financing crunch in the second half of the year. Although many companies especially in Germany have shown record sales and earnings in 2010 and 2011, buyers doubted the sustainability. The banks' reluctance in providing acquisition finance has also led to a number of shelved transaction processes and broken deals in the last quarter of the year 2011.

Despite these challenges we are glad to have been able to successfully finalise more than 22 transactions in 2011. This shows that in such difficult markets the preparation of transactions is of essential importance. Therefore, together with our colleagues from our management consulting practice we have developed a “transaction readiness assessment tool”. In the assessment, business, legal, valuation issues and potential deal breakers are identified by taking the current requirements of the relevant buyers universe and financing banks into account.