Deal Experience
A major advantage of our 25-year experience is that it has allowed clients to find the optimal transaction without boundaries of geography, sector or ‘thinking’. Our quest for the optimal deal – and dedication to that since all our methodologies are directly geared to finding it – would not be complete if we didn’t have a total comfort and track record in operating cross-border and between sector, sub-sector, horizontally and vertically.
Frequently, the optimal transaction is the one that takes a client into such new niches or geographies that they can’t achieve organically. We call any such side steps ‘value arbitraging’ another market. Our experience shows the majority of our work has not been in a box. This reach allows the optimal deal to be found wherever it happens to be.
Trans-border and trans-sector
1. Arbitraging another market: trans-border deals - entering a key market with the best target
Domestic 25%
Trans-border 75%
2. Arbitraging another sector: trans-sector deals or cross-subsector deals
Within sector
55%
Vertical move
Horizontal move
Horizontal move
Trans-sector
45%
Vertical move
3. Arbitraging another market and another sector
Trans-border
50%
Trans-sector
30%
Trans-border and trans-sector
20%
Vertical move
Synergistic deal focus
Arm's length
financial deals
10%
Simple energy evaluation without a formal JBP
30%
Joint Business Plan was performed before LOI
60%
Synergetic deals
90%
25-country experience
Although ThinkingLinking’s more than 80 deals have been concentrated in Europe and the US, we have completed deals in over 25 countries of the world. For acquirers, we have helped them break into many emerging markets for the first time and for owners we have often identified the optimal partner from a geography on the other side of the world that needed the particular company more than other competitors.
This cross-border expertise has delivered market access ‘arbitrage’ to acquirers, or superior valuations to owners since the cross-border counter-party was willing to pay a high market-entry premium.
While most transactions have been 100%, we have deep expertise in earnouts and majority transactions with put-and-call elements, and have arranged minority investments and joint ventures when more appropriate. The transaction structure selected is simply one more tool for achieving the optimal deal.
23 (deals)
United Kingdom
7 (deals)
Rest of the World
28 (deals)
North America
23 (deals)
Continental Europe
