STUDY SUMMARY
by Prof. Dr. Florian Bauer and Dr. Mai Anh Dao
The Covid pandemic had an immediate impact on M&A activity in terms of volume and numbers. Despite a sharp downturn, the global M&A activity is rebounding and neither the prophesized expected breakdown nor overwhelming fire sale auctions in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic occurred. Indeed, some of the hopes of cherry pickers crumbled and the reality looks very different: „The hope – not by us in the M&A team, but by the board members – was that some bargains would come onto the market and that we could help ourselves at a nice price. ... Good business models that were interesting for us were still good prior to and after Corona.” - as a Head of Corpoate Development summerizes the situation.
Expectations are that all activities along the M&A process will return to a pre-Corona mode once the pandemic turns into an endemic – except for one: the target screening.
The authors particularly investigate how the M&A behaviour is affected by the COVID-19 crisis and formulate key takeaways for M&A managers.
Dr. Mai Anh Dao and Prof. Dr. Florian Bauer
The founders, Mai Anh Dao and Florian Bauer, view target screening as the central strategic task of corporate development, one in which control, transparency, and traceability are crucial. Financial figures are not, as usual, the sole search criteria but merely serve as selection criteria.
The MADiscover solution digitizes the screening process for enabling M&A managers to identify business opportunities in a strategically driven, transparent and flexible manner. With our AI-based solution, we start where conventional financial KPI and network-driven screening ends.
