In Focus: The real deal
The wheels are in motion once again and we’re busy putting together our East Midlands Dealmakers Dinner, to be held in May.
The last couple of years, the event has been something of a downbeat affair, mainly due to a complete dearth of decent deals being completed. However, there’s a general feeling out there that there is now a decent appetite to push deals through.
Firms – especially in the law sector – are responding to the new realism by merging instead of fighting for the same contracts in a smaller and smaller pool. Those who have been lucky or skilled enough to put some cash by during the recession are now seriously looking at acquiring rivals at a much cheaper price than they could’ve done three or four years ago. And the advisers in the region now seem perkier than they have since the first half of 2008.
More good news came this week from the Centre for Management Buyout Research (CMBOR), which is, of course, based in at the University of Nottingham.
CMBOR says private equity is back with a bang. In 2010 11 deals were done in the East Midlands, compared with just six back in the dark days of 2009.
The winter of 2009/10 was a particularly worrying time for everyone, of course. The huge scale of the job losses was unfolding itself on an almost daily basis. More worryingly for us trying to put our deals pages together each month was the fact that there simply was no news…
The upturn from those days is heartening, to say the least. In 2009 there was just £64m worth of private equity-backed deals; last year this figure ballooned to £874m. Whilst we’re not back to 2007 levels just yet, the confidence showed by the private equity providers will surely rub off on the rest of the corporate finance sector.
The nomination forms for this year’s East Midlands Dealmakers event are being sent out this week. The last couple of years have seen a small pool of deals being chosen as potential winners. I get the feeling this year’s nominations will include a wider range of deals from across the sectors.
The heady days of 2006 and 2007 are long gone, say the corporate finance boys and girls locally, but in some ways they’re thankful they’ve gone. Companies were being sold for silly money, and that simply isn’t sustainable. What happened in 2010 was the market looking itself in the mirror and coming back in a more sensible, more ordered fashion. Long may it continue.
Comments? Sam Metcalf, Insider
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