Deal Process and Diligence

• Letter of intent wording on asset sale versus stock sale can move more money than the headline price itself
• Mid-market diligence rarely fails on one catastrophic issue, it fails on earnings and operations that cannot be verified
• A signed SPA and a seven million pound offer collapsed when the buyer vanished four weeks before completion
• A buyer cut its offer roughly in half twenty four hours before due diligence closed
• Buyer questions increasingly center on transition risk when an owner is still the key relationship holder
• The best management presentations in a sale process read as conversations, not rehearsed pitches
• A new legal series on tech M&A is covering deal mechanics specific to code and data-heavy targets

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Valuation

• Investment bankers price synergies separately from a target's standalone DCF value
• HVAC businesses under roughly one million dollars in earnings are priced on SDE, above that threshold buyers shift to adjusted EBITDA
• AI company valuations increasingly hinge on customer replaceability, model dependence, and data provenance

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Post-Merger Integration and Culture

• The most common PMI failure is solving for timelines instead of people
• Nine months after closing, the Omnicom-IPG merger has cut 4,000 jobs and doubled its cost savings target to $1.5 billion
• Teams that keep acquired systems running untouched outperform teams staging a dramatic restart
• Santander is taking its Webster Financial integration deliberately slowly, targeting systems conversion by the end of 2027
• Employees do not resist M&A because they fear change, they mourn a future they had already planned
• Behind the billion dollar headlines, mergers are also measured in the people and cultures left behind

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Market Data and Reports

• A study of more than two hundred CPG M&A deals found the five to ten year age range is the largest bucket for a successful exit
• Financial services M&A reached $499 billion across 612 deals over the past year
• In the German technical building services market, tenders that drew three bidders a year ago now draw fifteen
• Bain's Global M&A Report 2026 shows deal value rebounded 40 percent to $4.9 trillion in 2025
• Bain data shows M&A lifts shareholder returns 2.3 times, undercutting the widely cited 70 percent failure claim
• Tanzania's Fair Competition Commission found 38 of 43 merger cases involved deals closed without required notification
• The Hiller Companies alone completed 23 specialty trade acquisitions since January 2025

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Named Deals and Transactions

• Teledyne has agreed to acquire Varex Imaging for $18.90 per share, an aggregate deal value of approximately $1.1 billion
• CoStar is acquiring Zonda for $800 million cash, about 4.7 times revenue
• Aon is acquiring USI Insurance Services from KKR for $17 billion and NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
• Valley Bank is acquiring Illinois-based Providence Bank & Trust at about 1.45 times tangible book value
• Werewolf Therapeutics is pursuing an all-stock reverse merger with Ambros Therapeutics alongside a $150 million PIPE financing
• A €297 million Commerzbank buyback could push UniCredit's mBank stake above 50 percent, triggering a €4.25 billion obligation
• Paramount's proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery lost a planned meeting with the California Attorney General after media leaks

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Advisory and Industry Moves

• Tom Hakel and Ryan Vice launched CXO Capital Advisors, a sell-side M&A and capital advisory firm
• PwC and Palantir launched an AI-native Deals IT platform built on Palantir Foundry and AIP
• Deloitte added two partners, Anita Chang and Chris Stepanuik, to its Canadian Deal Transformation and PMI practice
• Paul Giannamore, who has managed over $10 billion of pest control acquisitions, joined a podcast on valuation and sale timing
• Daniel Shapiro relaunched his fractional CFO practice as Upslope CFO
• The Elgar Encyclopedia of Mergers and Acquisitions has published with contributions from academics and practitioners
• The second annual Outsider Capital M&A Golf Day doubled its attendance from the year before

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Thanks to Drew F., Bertrand de Cabarrus, Lindsey M. Wendler, Adam Lawrence, Jay Greyson, Dr. Korbinian Eichner, Peter Hogan, Lucie Zmijanjac, Jon Soos, Christoph Totter, Herwig Springer, Kinza Azmat, Kison Patel, Christopher Millward, Francine D., Eva Nie, Himanshu Singh, Dharmendra Singh, Rajiv Khaitan, Enrico Mowatt, Jonathan Boyers, Grace WU, Eamonn Greaves,  David Politis, Dr. Alexander Budzinski, Ian Teader, Gwen Pope, Kai Hesselmann, Archie Sampson, Amiri Sharifu, Pieter Slegers, Dominik Degen, John Orsini, Scott Avirett, Eric Krucke and Michael Ciotti for contributing insights to this edition.

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Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-linkedin-cw-35-36-ma-insights-thomas-allgeyer-y2sse/?trackingId=LHNtVMt%2BceoOhIOfJeje7Q%3D%3D