DealZone

Quite how much the world changed after Lehman Brothers fell is still up for debate. Perhaps not as much as indicated by a new piece of research by Towers Perrin. This starts with a drawn-out parallel between the demise of Dick Fuld’s bank and the work of sixth-century monk Dionysius Exiguus, whose invention of the BC/AD system, Towers says, came to “define civilization”.

Still, once the long-dead monks are out of the way, the Towers Perrin / Cass research shows that for the select band of firms brave – and strong – enough to undertake M&A post-Lehman, the reward has been stock market out-performance. And it was even better for an elite band able to make more than one acquisition. As I wrote:

“Stock markets rewarded companies such as Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and Cisco (CSCO.O) who were brave enough to make acquisitions in the months after Lehman Brothers’ collapse, a study released on Monday showed.

“Although firms who made purchases worth $100 million or more suffered an average 25.5 percent fall in their stock price, they outperformed the wider market by 6.3 percentage points, the Towers Perrin/Cass Business School research found.”

Read the full story here. Incidentally Towers and rival consultants Watson Wyatt have taken their own advice and are working on an all-stock merger. Wonder who they will tap for merger consulting?

Another auction — appropriately enough, this time of a waste management firm — is consigned to the dustbin of history. As Catherine Hornby and I wrote earlier:

“Dutch utility Essent scrapped the sale of its waste-management unit, blaming low prices and other problems with bids for the failure of an auction that had once aimed to raise a billion euros or more.

“The sale of Essent Milieu, which bankers began working on in late 2008, had originally promised to be one of Europe’s first big leveraged buyouts (LBOs) since the credit crunch, with a staple financing helping attract private equity firms such as BC Partners and PAI.

Financial public relations firms, who elevated the honing of corporate messages to a highly profitable art form, are having to adapt their businesses and in some cases cut staff as the economic gloom intensifies.

With far fewer deals to publicize and lucrative “retainer” contracts under pressure, companies are cutting costs and are increasingly focusing on work thrown up by the crisis, such as capital-raising, restructuring and repairing tarnished images.”

So what exactly are they up to?

Some recent pr industry blogs and other web postings shine a light on some of the spinmeisters’ latest tactics.

For M&A bankers, 2008 is perhaps best remembered using the catchphrase of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons: “Worst. Year. Ever.”
    
Dealmaking reached record lows in 2008, dominated by cancelled deals. At the start of 2009, questions linger about several companies, executives and deals. Most notably, though, there is a big question mark over private equity.     

Last year was a bad year for PE firms as credit markets became too tight, stocks fell unpredictably low, and deals that were announced in better times began falling apart.  PE deals fell to a five-year low.

The ‘Golden Age’ of PE quickly faded as many of the biggest buyouts announced in 2007 collapsed in 2008, including the $41 billion deal for Canadian telecommunications operator BCE, the largest announced buyout in history.