In this workout ee have an Excel file with four tabs the welcome, info, transaction comparables, and synergy analysis.

Let's go all the way to the synergy analysis to start.

Here we have an assignment and in just a moment I'm going to ask you to read through it in your own time, but we're looking at a potential acquisition of White Wave by JM Smucker In a second we'll get you to read through the JM smucker description and the description of White Wave Food Company.

We've then got underneath is an empty table.

We need the details from some past transactions that are comparable.

And we want to put them in here.

Those comparable transactions are on the transaction comparables tabs.

Let's go have a quick look at that.

So here we've got some transactions, we've got an acquire, we've got a target, we've got dates, etc.

What we need you to do is read through the descriptions of the transaction.

Then read through each of these transactions and then choose the transactions from this tab that you think would be useful as comparable transactions for the one on our synergy analysis tab.

If we scroll all the way over to the right hand side, you might notice that we have a wordy description of each transaction to help you out.

However, how do we choose our transactions? Well firstly, if we have a look at column R we can see that only some of the transactions have given us synergies as a percentage of the target sales.

So while I would include This deal in row 7 I would not include the deals above or the deals below.

So get yourself firstly to a short list of just those deals.

Our deal is going to be happening in the year 16. So I've then secondly remove any deals that are too old, then remove those in a different geography, then remove those that you think are maybe too small any revenues well below a billion dollars.

Now you should hopefully have a short list left over but this is an art not a science and there is no correct answer. We will present our answer to you in just a moment. So just a quick recap, what I need you to do on the synergies analysis tab is read through the assignment and the descriptions.

And then on the transaction comparable tab get yourself a short list of transactions and copy them in here.

So if you want to pause the recording now go do that and then we'll talk through the transactions we chose.

So here are the four transactions that we have chosen, but remember there's no one correct answer.

But let me try and convince you of why I've chosen these four.

First of all, we reduced our list to those that only contained synergies figures and these four do contain synergies figures.

We then got rid of any that were too old. All of these are just around about the five maybe six years of our deal in years 16.

Thirdly, both of my companies were US-based but with some European operations, we have a look at where all of these deals are based. They were all USA focused.

Any transactions that were then too small we removed.

The revenues of White Wave are just under four billion dollars. We decided to have a cut off of 1 billion and that got rid of a couple of more deals.

That then left us with these four transactions and importantly one of them actually includes JM smucker itself, the proposed acquirer in this transaction.

There was one other JM smucker that we could have included from the previous page, but it was from the year 08 and we thought that was a little bit too old.

So that gets us down to hour for comparable transactions.