The business news continues to concern the deal community, as financial institutions take more big hits from overexposure to collaterized debt. How will this impact global M&A? The world's leading dealmakers gathered to discuss the question at The Deal's M&A Outlook 2008 conference Wednesday at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Battery Park in New York City.
The business news continues to concern the deal community, as financial institutions take more big hits from overexposure to collaterized debt. How will this impact global M&A? The world's leading dealmakers gathered to discuss the question at The Deal's M&A Outlook 2008 conference Wednesday at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Battery Park in New York City.
The high-powered panelists included Leon Black, Bruce Wasserstein, David M. Rubenstein, Martin Lipton, Wilber Ross Jr. and more. The day was filled with discussion over the various caveats within M&A and what these titans of M&A see ahead for dealmaking in 2008.
Some noteworthy comments and highlights from the conference:
Wasserstein observed: "The M&A business will be OK, but it will be different. It has morphed into something new. There will be more recaps, more investments, more cross-border. Some industries will boom; some will see split-ups, asset sales."
Black commented that "there's no question that this summer the world changed for private equity" as the credit markets that allowed "private equity to go from being 3% of the M&A market to 35% in 2007 shut down for doing highly leveraged deals." "The ability of private equity and acquisitive strategic buyers to innovate in terms of financing is almost unlimited," added Lipton.
Ross pointed to his company WL Ross & Co.’s chart system of targeting industries and companies to acquire. The Deal writer Carolyn Murphy pointed out on Wilber Ross: “They take an industry and delineate anything they see that’s wrong. Next, they draw up a second chart and point to things they’d change if they had control. If the two charts can be brought together, then it makes sense to invest."
The M&A Outlook 2008 spotlight on the healthcare sector also proved very interesting as Michael Kaplan, a director of the healthcare team at Standard & Poor’s and moderator of the panel, pointed out that because of the decline of the dollar European companies have been active in M&A and should continue to do so for quite some time.
For more coverage on The Deals’s M&A Outlook Conference 2008, please check out Dealscape. – Gerald Magpily
