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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 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.
