Vendor Best Practices: M&A Survival Kit

This Briefing will prepare executives in the Information Content (IC) Industry for what Outsell expects to be a resurgent mergers & acquisitions (M&A) market in 2004. The Briefing offers five central best practices to help buying and selling companies thrive: stay focused on strategic objectives; drive the process rather than be driven by it; for sellers, focus on what makes your company valuable; prepare an M&A deal team that is capable of carrying out detailed due diligence and implementing the deal; and be prepared to see the deal through to the technical and cultural integration of the companies. It also identifies hot sectors and M&A trends to watch within the IC market, including workflow integration, paid search, portfolio rationalization, and privatization. Finally, the Briefing gets inside a typical M&A brokered auction transaction with a 40-item checklist of steps for both buyer and seller. Selected IC Industry boutique investment banking firms are identified. For IC Industry company executives, this Briefing is the definitive guide to M&A and some of the specifics of M&A in our industry.