Navigating uncertainty across M&A deals

According to Forbes in an article published in 2024, 70-75% of M&A operations fail. Such a high percentage of failure can be explained by a variety of reasons such wrongs calculations on synergies, culture matching problems, too optimistic revenue forecasting or misaligned incentives.

Our typical work in M&A support clients in assignments such as:

M&A due diligence in Greece. Three companies participating in a real estate deal with our client. The project required a native greek speaker with intelligence gathering capabilities, open and expert source intelligence and involved three other jurisdictions across the EU and the UK.

A tourism industry 4B M&A deal. Our client as a last check before completing an investment of 4B retained us to conduct a deep level diligence on the operational side of the company. Our work involved anti-trust and competition risks, executive team performance, customer portfolio and connections between three larger customers.

Management team due diligence in an energy company owning 10B in renewable energy assets. The assignment involved gathering intelligence in three countries, interviewing former employees, recruitment executives and industry experts to know about past performance, ethics, personal character and connections inside and outside the corporation.

Interloper investigation. An interloper is a competing bidder with an economically more attractive offer, jumping unexpectedly in an M&A process. The premium offered by the interloper was suspiciously very close to a confidential agreed price between the two companies involved in a confidential merger. Our firm developed a source network of industry experts to know more about the bidder and how the bidder obtained confidential information about the process.

Executive due diligence. One of the world´s largest construction companies involved in a merger selected an executive to be the CEO of the Newco. According to media sources the executive professional reputation was outstanding but the client found public references of a sexual harassment scandal and wanted to know dig deeper into the issue. We deployed a source network consulting former employees and industry experts and discreetly obtained detailed information about the issue and the internal reputation of the executive.

Activist investor hedge fund exploring cybersecurity market in the Middle East. Our firm was retained to discreetly explore and measure market size and client revenue cycles in the cybersecurity industry across the Arabian Peninsula. We deployed an industry experts network to know the best known companies, and those owning hidden talent across the region. Our work supported a hedge fund investing 100M US$ in the industry to foster cybersecurity across the region.

Discovering high- technology in the object tracking industry. One of our clients in search of innovative and new technologies hired us to search of a hidden firm manufacturing a new innovative and cheap technology. Our market scan involved asking experts in the industry, law enforcement and intelligence services to provide an assessment of whether the technology existed or not, and how effective the technology was.