Dutch Acquisitions

Joe and I are busy preparing for our acquisition finance course next week in Amsterdam.  As part of that preparation, we are looking at some of the deal activity in Europe.*  The slides below are preliminary, and some of the numbers need to be verified but some interesting trends appear.  The United Kingdom leads with the largest dollar volume of deals over the past five years and the largest number of deals.  The Netherlands is second in terms of deal value, a statistic undoubtedly driven by the large deals involving ABN-AMRO, Royal Dutch Petroleum, and Mittal Steel, among others.  We'll be exploring and discussing the implications of various aspects of deal design related to these and other acquisitions in the course.  We will also feature a case analysis of the ABN-AMRO deal.

All the best,

Ralph

* The negative premia for the ING group is misleading, the result of a large capital infusion by the government.  See

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/3228663/ING-shares-jump-on-10bn-capital-injection.html