Welcome to our regular deal round-up.
Market overview
We have seen a marked increase in deal activity in the last 6 months, not just in our own deals but across the board. This has been driven by a couple of factors. Firstly, there was a strong suspicion that the Chancellor would make changes to CGT in the Spring budget, which caused many business owners to consider exit options in the run up. In the end the CGT changes never materialised, but it did create a hard deadline which drove deal activity. Secondly, after reduced activity up to the middle of 2020 we saw deals which had paused in March 2020 restart, and the appearance of a very strong stream of new opportunities – a trend that shows no signs of abating.
These new opportunities, our expectation that the Chancellor has merely deferred CGT changes – perhaps to later in 2021, and the effectiveness of the UK vaccine rollout speeding the UK to some semblance of normality, all promise to deliver a very busy 2021 for transactions. We believe there are strong arguments for both buyers and sellers to consider transactions in the near term.
Dan Bowtell, Corporate Finance Partner
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