M&A Banking Expert Interview - Quantifying Deal Synergies
- 02:28
M&A Banking Expert Interview - Quantifying Deal Synergies
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Synergies. Million dollar question. It's not easy. Cost synergies typically are easier to quantify than revenue, but even then, it's really more an art than a science. And I think what many people miss is that there are costs that are required to achieve those synergies. I personally only realized this when I moved from an M&A environment to working in-house. Getting a transaction done and announcing synergies is one thing. Working on the post-merger integration is another aspect altogether. And I think one thing is important to realize that synergies, although they're important, they're not everything. We have to also look at the costs involved in extracting those synergies. Is it cost effective? If we're gonna spend 10 million pounds to extract synergies of 25 million, is it actually worth it? And the other thing to bear in mind is timing. One thing with synergies is that it always, always takes so much longer. Bankers, and I'm guilty of this too, always forget the human element. At the end of the day, we've got teams, large teams, people who've worked together for several years they have a certain culture to suddenly take two sets of cultures, put them together and then expect efficiencies to come out of it in a matter of days and weeks is not possible. So taking into account the human and the timing perspective is very important, but also really, really difficult to quantify. So I'll just sum up by saying that although synergies are important, they're not everything. It's the valuation, it's the deal the transaction price that is key. Synergies are aspirational. Of course, I've worked on transactions where we've managed to deliver more synergies than expected, but this is actually quite rare. More often than not, it's the other way around. So when you add this to a company that's already perhaps overpaying for an asset, it really becomes a bit of a big deal and it starts to look pretty dire from a shareholder perspective. So what I'll just sort of sum up to say is that synergies are important, but they're not everything. The focus really is on delivering shareholder value. You do that by unlocking value, perhaps by adding more geographical reach new product lines or other sort of offerings. At the end of the day, it's always worth remembering that synergies as a percentage of the transaction price are a very, very small element anyway.