THE DEAL LLC UNVEILS CANDIDATES FOR 3rd ANNUAL MOST ADMIRED CORPORATE DEALMAKERS AWARDS
Annual awards recognize companies that have done the best work in strategic M&A within five sectors: pharma-biotech, information technology, financial services, industrials and food & beverage.
NEW YORK- June 24, 2010 - The Deal LLC, (www.TheDeal.com), a diversified media and information company, today announces the 25 candidates - the five best-performing, transaction-intensive large-cap companies in each of five industry categories - for its third annual Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers Awards survey.
The winners, to be determined by surveying The Deal Magazine's audience and The Deal Pipeline users, will be profiled on September 20 in The Deal Magazine and later recognized at a ceremony and reception as part of Deal Economy 2011, a two-day forecasting event taking place at the New York Stock Exchange on December 2 and 3 (www.thedeal.com/dealeconomy2011). The Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers Awards honor companies that have made the most effective use of transactional tools across five industry sectors: pharma-biotech-life sciences, information technology, financial services, industrials and food & beverage. The survey, results from previous years and a blog on the project can be found at www.thedeal.com/mostadmired.
The survey candidates were determined statistically using a two-step process. First, The Deal's editors worked with Standard & Poor's Capital IQ to compile lists of the 10 most transaction-intensive large-cap companies in each sector, along with all the deals they closed in the three-year period ended December 30, 2009. To be included, companies had to be U.S.-based, with a market capitalization of $5 billion at the end of the period. The second step was to select the five companies within that group of 10 M&A intensive corporations whose market cap showed the greatest increase (or smallest decrease) in the study period.
The result is a roster of 25 companies that have made transactions a significant part of their strategies and also delivered superior value to shareholders. As Kenneth Klee, editor of corporate coverage for The Deal, writes in the June 21 issue of The Deal Magazine, "With a single exception, every one of the companies thus selected outperformed its sector as a whole, often by a country mile." The 2010 Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers Award candidates are:
Pharma-Biotech-Life SciencesIndustrials Merck & Co. Republic Services Inc. Life Technologies Corp. Danaher Corp. Mylan Inc. United Technologies Corp. Abbott Laboratories Eaton Corp. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. 3M Co.
Information TechnologyFinancial Services Hewlett-Packard Co. Wells Fargo & Co.
Oracle Corp. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
Microsoft Corp. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. IBM Corp. Aon Corp.
EMC Corp. People's United Financial Inc.
Food and Beverage Coca-Cola Co. J.M. Smucker Co. Bunge Ltd.
HJ Heinz Co. General Mills Inc.
The second step, screening for market-cap performance, marks a change in the survey this year. "It was not without a bit of soul-searching," Klee says, "since we knew we'd be excluding some companies with strong deal teams who may have fallen short for other reasons. But in the end we decided a sports analogy applies: Should the most valuable player award go to someone who plays for one of the more successful teams? We're answering in the affirmative."
Other changes to the survey this year are the expansion to five sectors from three, and conducting the survey earlier in the year so that the results can be revealed in September as opposed to years-end.
As in previous surveys The Deal's audience--transaction-focused corporate executives, financiers, investors and advisers--will be asked to rate each company on four criteria:
Overall strategy: rationale for the transactions and choice of targets (or, in divestitures, the business sold)
Value: price paid (or received) compared with value that can be extracted
Execution: ability or likelihood to capture stated benefits, value and synergies
Quality of the deal team: skills and knowledge base of corporate development staff, line executives, top management and other company participants
Survey participants will have access to a wealth of information about the companies and their deals as they express their views. The survey, conducted with the assistance of Applied Research-West, is located at www.thedeal.com/cdsurvey, and will be open to participants until July 30, 2010.
An article detailing the Most Admired Corporate Dealmakers study, along with data on the deals done by the candidate companies, appears in the June 21 issue of The Deal Magazine, and online at www.thedeal.com/magazine. A second article announcing the winners will be published in both The Deal Magazine and online on September 20.
About The Deal LLC The Deal LLC (www.TheDeal.com) is a diversified media and information company. We report, analyze and disseminate business and financial news and data that offer fresh insights on the deal economy, a set of interrelated activities, focused on dealmaking of all kinds, whose purpose is to generate corporate and capital growth in a continually changing global market. We serve the global deal community - corporate and financial dealmakers, advisers and institutional investors - with The Deal Pipeline, a transaction information service, and The Deal Magazine, a business and financial magazine, website and event brand. 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 website at www.capitaliq.com.
