PwC’s M&A team ranked as Poland’s deals leader by Mergermarket
13/01/20
Mergermarket, a prestigious international portal focused on transactions and business intelligence, has named the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) team at PwC Poland as the number one advisor in the Polish market in terms of number of deals concluded in 2019. The top-ranking advisory team, led by Adam Demusiak, was involved in 13 transactions concluded in Poland worth a total of PLN 5.7 billion.
The Polish market continues to grow at a whirlwind pace in terms of M&A transactions. This results both from the great accessibility of capital and from Polish entities’ gradual attainment of an increasingly significant scale against the backdrop of the international arena. Also, the moment has come when certain Polish entrepreneurs, intensively growing their businesses since the country’s transformation in 1989, are starting to seek ways to step back, solve succession issues, or tackle challenges together with new business partners. The coming year is poised to be just as interesting for the Polish M&A market, despite the expected economic slowdown.
Last year, PwC’s M&A team, led by Adam Demusiak, served as the lead advisor on deals for such market players as Masterlease, Polcom, Masterchem, and Przelewy24. The total value of all deals made with the aid of PwC’s M&A team in 2019 was around PLN 5.7 billion (the value of most transactions carried out on the private market is confidential – that’s why the value given above was not published in Mergermarket’s ranking).
The M&A team at PwC is part of PwC’s Deals Platform, a team of over 150 experts who focus exclusively on the market of transactions in Poland and in the CEE region. Deals Platform consultants advise clients throughout all stages of a transaction’s lifecycle – from generating the deal concept, identifying the target company, working out a strategy, and bringing the deal to fruition, all the way to completing integration and creating value in the post-deal period. Members of the team work together on a wide range of areas, from tax strategy to deal financing, for both buyers and sellers, private equity funds, strategic and individual investors.
A recent PwC report “Creating Value Beyond the Deal” indicates that with acquisition prices exceptionally high and with once-reliable sources of deal value generation – such as cost-cutting and the ability to generate returns through leverage – getting squeezed, buyers now have to work harder to secure payback on their transactions.
This rapidly shifting landscape comes against the backdrop of record transaction activity, with dealmaking by private equity as a proportion of global deal activity at its highest level since 2013. Crafting the right post-deal value creation strategy is becoming one of the priorities.
Mergermarket’s annually published ranking is based on the analysis of information on mergers and acquisitions around the world. It includes deals concluded in a given year, involving at least USD 5 million and at least 30% of the shares sold in a given entity. The values of most of transactions in the private market are confidential and therefore not included in Mergermarket’s data.
