Market

A significant part of the M&A transaction activity in the Baltics last year measured by volume was generated by the financial services sector. The Polish insurer PZU acquired the RSA Insurance Group operations in the region while a group of investors led by Ripplewood Advisors took controlling interest in Citadele Banka AS, to name but a few. Both deals can be used to illustrate some of the prevailing European financial services M&A market trends last year - growth-seeking firms picking up sub-optimal size and non-core operations of their peers in intra-European transactions and financial buyers pushing into the financial services sector. Read more...

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Life moves in mysterious ways indeed. After years of almost complete obscurity Alta Capital, the symbol of aggressive private equity deal making during the 2000s, has suddenly resurfaced and reminded about itself. Just a week ago we had to mention it when talking about the past ownership of Graanul Invest, the publicity-shy Estonian producer of wood pellets (more on that here). This week has started with the news about Rigas Piensaimnieks SIA, a Latvian dairy products manufacturer, another chapter in Alta Capital stories. Read more...

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The topic of initial public offerings (IPOs) has come up in several of our notes recently (for instance, here and here). IPOs not only reflect the general economic activity (and venture capital and private equity exit activity in particular), but also provide an important benchmark about the values the market assigns to particular subsectors and sectors.

The recent Global Technology IPO Review Q1 2015 (a full text of which is available here) by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, provides some interesting data about the activity levels in technology IPOs globally this year. It concludes that with very respectable 23 IPOs raising USD 6.1 billion (EUR 5.6 billion) globally, the Q1 2015 results have nevertheless fallen short of the spectacular Q1 2014 when USD 6.8 billion were raised in 26 IPOs. Read more...

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“Curiouser and curiouser,” said little Alice when confronted with the realities of Wonderland. It is a fairly common practice in this part of the world that the transaction details, and price in particular, are not revealed to the public. But keeping this information confidential for those in the Baltics while circulating a press release with all the details in Sweden is kind of a novel approach indeed! Read more...

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Some perceptions are simply too strongly entrenched so that they get almost universally accepted and are seldom challenged. In M&A context, one such assumption is that it is primarily about the acquisitions, while another suggests that only investment bankers’ and corporate financiers’ views on deal-making matter. As a result, media get flooded with stories about the acquisition battles, but very little attention is devoted to disposals. And the other members of deal-teams working on the transactions, like lawyers and accountants, get little attention and credit, if any at all. Read more...

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