At the recent M&A Worldwide Rainmaker Summit, the sale of Burnhart Holdings (trading as WEC Group) to Amari UK Inc. won the vote for the M&A Worldwide Deal of the Year, against spirited competition from three other cross-border deals. FOCUS represented the transaction in the U.S. and introduced the transaction to the buyer, which is owned by a US-based investor.
FOCUS bankers Jorge Maceyras and John Slater joined Brian Higgins of Rickett Mitchell, Manchester UK, in accepting the award on behalf of the FOCUS Advanced Manufacturing & Automation Team.
FOCUS, Active M&A, Aeternus, MBA Capital, and Morgen Evan all assisted in the pitch process in the key global markets for metal products manufacturing, providing feedback on the information memorandum and helping in the active marketing phase. Several other M&A Worldwide members rounded out the global coverage for the transaction.
FOCUS Helps Valuation Increase Significantly
Among the factors sealing the win was the size of the transaction, largest to date for a cross-border deal originated by M&A Worldwide members. As a result of the competitive global process created through the M&A Worldwide network, the ultimate purchase price achieved was roughly one third higher than the offers initially received from home country bidders.
Other challenges included a complex shareholding structure with many minority shareholdings in subsidiaries and no overall shareholder’s agreement to define how a sale of the group would be shared amongst all shareholders.
Cooperation Between M&A Worldwide Members Definitely Led to a Better Result for the Seller/Buyer
FOCUS created a robust target list of US strategic and financial buyers and pursued extensive networking efforts to expand the horizons of the search. Through this process, FOCUS identified the ultimate investors behind Amari UK Inc. (a midwestern family office), providing the ideal buyer for WEC. This enabled the current management team to remain in day-to-day control of WEC while cashing in their investment in full.
M&A Worldwide Advanced Manufacturing & Automation Group to Benefit from WEC Group Deal
The experience gained from this combined effort will be applied to improve the M&A Worldwide approach to supporting significant cross-border sell side opportunities. A major goal of M&A Worldwide is for the Advanced Manufacturing & Automation Group to use these lessons learned to generate a coordinated approach for globally marketed sell side and buy side opportunities.
