In our continuing review of MediaFutures International 2020, we focus this week on M&A.
In the US survey, 42% of companies expect to be involved in some kind of M&A activity over the next two years. Some 50% of B2C companies expect to sell and 25% expect to acquire. But 64% of B2B companies do not expect to do either.
The scores may reflect the view among 50% of consumer companies that recent M&A has been “extremely successful”, while only 23% of B2B deals had been “extremely successful” and 8% “extremely unsuccessful”.
In the UK, 40% of all companies had been involved in recent M&A (up by 30% since last year’s report) but the “satisfaction” level of such deals has dropped markedly due to “poor due diligence” or “cultural mis-matches”. While UK companies tend to view the advantages of M&S as being to achieve scale economies and/or diversification, the more cautious companies feared they lacked the money, manpower and expertise to undertake significant acquisitions of any kind.
One B2C publisher in the UK says: “We’ve recently made good purchases and bad ones – the good ones outweigh the bad (and the bad were made worse and terminal by Covid). We look to acquire strong brands that are either too small for a corporate or have been published by companies that have been too small to sustain them. Yet, we are also looking for under-exploited large audience digital brands.”
MediaFutures is a survey into the views and verdicts of senior executives from 331 media companies in the UK, US, Europe and the AsiaPacific. The findings are packed with detailed information about what lies ahead for publishers of newspapers, magazines and B2B media.
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