THE DEAL LLC UNVEILS CANDIDATES FOR 2ND ANNUAL MOST ADMIRED CORPORATE DEALMAKERS AWARDS

Annual awards recognize companies that have done the best work in strategic M&A in three sectors: pharma-biotech, media and information technology

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- September 21, 2009 -- The Deal LLC, (www.TheDeal.com), the media and information company for the deal economy, today announces the candidates for its second annual Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers Awards program.

The winners, to be determined by surveying readers across The Deal's products, will be recognized in a luncheon ceremony at The Deal's Deal Economy 2010 conference, a two-day forecasting event taking place Nov. 18 and 19 at the Union League Club of New York. The Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers Awards will honor companies that have made the most effective strategic use of transactional tools within three industry sectors: pharma-biotech, media and information technology.

Candidate companies for the survey were determined statistically, and represent a roll call of the most transaction-intensive large companies in each sector. They are:

Pharma-Biotech:               Media:                                IT:
Abbott Laboratories           Cablevision Systems Corp.  Cisco Systems Inc.
Allergan Inc.                     CBS Corp.                          eBay Inc.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.   Comcast Corp.                   EMC Corp.
Celgene Corp.                   John Wiley & Sons Inc.       Fiserv Inc.
Eli Lilly & Co.                    Liberty Global Inc.              Hewlett-Packard Co.
Genzyme Corp.                 Morningstar Inc.                 IBM Corp.
Gilead Sciences Inc.          News Corp.                       Microsoft Corp.
Johnson & Johnson           Sirius XM Radio Inc.           Motorola Inc.
Merck & Co.                     Time Warner Inc.               Oracle Corp.
Pfizer Inc.                         Walt Disney Co.                Symantec Corp.

Companies considered for the survey were those with a market capitalization of $5 billion or more as of June 30, 2009 or, in the case of media, a market cap of $1 billion on that date. The Deal, along with data partner Capital IQ, the leader in Web-based professional financial information services, then screened for the companies in each sector that closed the highest number and dollar value of acquisitions and divestitures in the previous three and a half years.  The selection formula also recognized companies for doing a high dollar volume of deals compared to their market capitalizations on the start date.

After Capital IQ determined the initial pool of candidates, editors at The Deal reviewed each company's transaction lists and checked them against The Deal Pipeline, (www.thedeal.com/pipeline), a deal discovery, analysis and sourcing database, to narrow the list to 30 major companies.

The Deal's audience--transaction-focused corporate executives, financiers, investors and advisers--will determine the winners. With the assistance of survey partner Applied Research-West, readers will be asked to rate each company on four criteria: choice of targets and strategy; price paid (or received) compared to value; execution, including integration; and overall quality of the deal team. Participants will have access to a wealth of information about the companies and their deals. The survey, located at www.thedeal.com/cdsurvey, will be open to participants until Oct. 9, 2009.  

An article detailing the Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers study, along with data on the deals done by the candidate companies, appears in the Sept. 21 issue of The Deal magazine, and online at www.thedeal.com/newsweekly/. A second article, announcing the winners, will be published in both The Deal and online, shortly after award recipients are announced at the luncheon ceremony on Nov. 30.

About The Deal LLC
The Deal LLC, (www.thedeal.com), is a diversified media company that is the authoritative voice of the deal economy. We serve the global deal community-corporate and financial dealmakers, advisers and institutional investors-by providing business and financial news and information that offers fresh insights on the deal economy, a set of interrelated activities, focused on dealmaking of all kinds, whose purpose is to generate corporate growth in a continually changing global market. We offer a comprehensive line of print and electronic products - The Deal Pipeline, The Deal, The Daily Deal and TheDeal.com - and live annual events including Private Capital Symposium, Distressed Investing Forum and The Deal Economy. The Deal LLC, a privately held company, is owned by private investment funds sponsored by Wasserstein & Co. LP. 

About Standard & Poor's Capital IQ
Capital IQ, a Standard & Poor's business, delivers comprehensive fundamental and quantitative research and analysis solutions to over 4,200 investment management firms, investment banks, private equity funds, advisory firms, corporations, and universities worldwide. Its solutions are based on the Capital IQ Platform, Compustat, ClariFI, and SystematIQ products, and offer an array of powerful applications for desktop research, screening, real-time market data, backtesting, portfolio management, financial modeling, and quantitative analysis. For more information, please visit Capital IQ's web site at www.capitaliq.com.