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The best in strategic M&A

by Baz Hiralal | Published September 20, 2011 at 4:30 PM

The winners of the 4th annual Most Admired Corporate Dealmaker awards are J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (finance), Abbott Laboratories (healthcare), Exxon Mobil Corp. (energy), Oracle Corp. (IT) and Walt Disney Co. (consumer discretionary [although our video director believes visiting Disney World is a consumer staple]).

This is an authoritative list. Why? Well, there's two parts. And everything culminates with a grand event at the New York Stock Exchange: The Deal Economy 2012.

First, we at The Deal LLC put in countless hours since January crunching numbers with our data partner Dealogic. That's something that should get easier every year, but I've been a part of this since the first go-around four years ago and as the process gets refined, we get more work -- but it's worth it because we get a sweet cocktail party on the NYSE trading floor. For example, this year, we created a unique list of sectors, integrating the Standard & Poor's GICS classification with Dealogic's. After calculating various M&A metrics, filtering out hundreds of companies and drinking lots of coffee over several months (shout out to Dealogic's Natalie Cogan for being at our beckon call with a winning smile), we came up with a list of five companies in five sectors that were deal-intensive over the previous three years and showed market cap performance that was better than their peers.

Second, we asked their industry peers to rate the best. As Corporate Dealmaker editor Suzanne Miller explains in the video below, this is another reason these winners actually have some clout. We didn't just e-mail blast the world a la Nigerian scammer; we asked people who have actually sat at the deal table with these companies to voice their opinion: corporate dealmaking peers, investment bankers and the buy side, for example. Cheers to Rivel Research Group's Reid Vail for handling the voting process. And to our voters for taking the time to look at the numbers we put together, such as these on Exxon Mobil.

So you add those points together and what you have is a list of companies that managed to get deals done the right way. And as everyone in the dealmaking world knows, that's no easy task, especially when the deals are huge and more so in the Great Recession. And if that's not enough, our journalists have done a deep-dive into the strategies of the winning companies. This is some solid writing, as evidenced by senior writer Chris Nolter's take on Walt Disney. He not only highlights its 2009 acquisition of Marvel Entertainment Inc. for $4 billion but analyzes Disney's M&A prowess at large and learns what's on the mind of its corporate strategy and business development head Kevin Mayer. You can get to all the stories by clicking the companies' names above or clicking around http://www.thedeal.com/mostadmired/. Everything is also hosted on our revamped website for The Deal magazine.

And if that's not enough, we flew a couple people from our video team out to California to talk to Mayer in person. This is definitely one of our best videos to date. Thanks to perpetually energetic senior editor Mary Kathleen Flynn and to George White (the video director I mentioned above who was elated when he learned Disney was one of the winners and would probably have paid for the trip himself) for fitting a long-distance trip into their demanding schedules. But enough of my pull-the-reader-in-by-tying-personalities-into-the-copy witticisms. Check out this video and see what I'm talking about.

Finally, as I mentioned, this all culminates with a an awards ceremony at the NYSE on Nov. 30. The awards dinner is actually part of our flagship conference, The Deal Economy 2012, which has an enviable guest list that keeps growing. It's been a long process, with help from many departments here -- a special thanks to our art, IT and marketing folks for taking all my requests with a smile (at least that's how I like to imagine it).

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