Welcome to our Corporate Finance division’s regular deal round-up.
Market overview
Welcome to Deal Dispatch, the first edition under our new PKF Smith Cooper branding – more of which later – that showcases some of our recent transactions. Since our mid-Summer edition, the pandemic has continued to create difficult environments for many, so we count ourselves very fortunate to have had the benefit of a buoyant M&A market; whilst some sectors have obviously been detrimentally affected, others have prospered because of, or despite, the pandemic.
Businesses and the market have continued to benefit from government support, access to low-interest debt and plentiful “dry powder” in Private Equity coffers, a sharp economic recovery, and strong demand for internationally “cheap” UK assets – especially from the US and Europe.
However, the future heralds the winding down of government support, potential changes to Capital
Gains Tax (CGT), and the possibility of inflation and tightening of the supply chain – all macro issues that may impact on the M&A market, whether positively or negatively. We look at recent opinion on CGT and inflation later in this edition.
Our overall conclusions are that the future is especially hard to predict at present, and so there are certainly good reasons, for both buyers and sellers, to seize the conducive M&A conditions we are seeing now.
John Farnsworth, Head of Corporate Finance
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