As transactions are sensitive strategic processes, names of companies and executives in all MotionHall case studies are anonymized.
The Board at Pines Specialty Pharma is interested in taking advantage of the current market environment, and its ability to capitalize the company to complete a transformational M&A. Pines is a fully integrated specialty pharmaceutical company with an active salesforce, an interesting pipeline, and a platform technology with broad applications.
The Board appreciates the opportunity for Pines to acquire another company with a complementary pipeline as well as an interlocking salesforce, and is open to other capabilities that would result in an additive or transformational overall fit.
The goal in this particular search is to find an acquisition that leads to an outcome that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is highly complex, multivariate in nature, and one particular solution may look radically different from another solution in its components, but needs to be similar overall in the transformational potential of the deal.
The team at Pines also appreciates that the ideal transformation may consist of multiple less obvious acquisitions, where again, the sum of the resulting group is greater than its parts. This leads to significantly greater complexity in the search, evaluation and tracking of opportunities.
The senior interested board member, Juergen Lehmann, has a history as an investment banker and explicitly does not want to work with the banks in finding this transformational deal—not because he doesn't respect the banks, in fact, he laughs, “I am a banker”. But, in his own words, “Bankers will bring their own incentives to the transaction, and we really want to make sure that we've seen everything and are able to make the best choice for Pines Specialty Pharma."
Juergen introduces MotionHall as an impartial, comprehensive and algorithmic solution — through the Model and Platform, as well as MotionHall’s expertise. "MotionHall brings impartiality and a perspective unbiased by the normal incentives of an M&A advisor, and a best-in-class approach to help us get this deal done.”
The Method and Strategy Consulting Team is happy to work with Pines Specialty Pharma. Through Juergen, the team gets to know the CEO, the Business Development and Corporate Development Team, and the Scientific Leadership of Pines, to understand the preferences and requirements that each group and stakeholder brings to the table.
This informs the set of complex and dynamic multivariate search criteria that will be used to interrogate the MotionHall Model and produce unique dashboards and workflows for the Pines team on their access point to the web-based MotionHall Platform.
Senior leadership realizes that any deal that meets the majority of their criteria is likely to be competitive. Of course, everyone is interested in uncovering surprises, such as targets that may be undervalued or overlooked by competing acquirers.
So part of the strategic considerations when planning for this transformational M&A process is to understand how to model the landscape of potential competitive bidders for targets of interest.
Jane, the Head of Corporate Development, jokes that “It's like having a war room.” — “We want to see not just everything that might be in competition with a potential target and its technology but also everything that might be in competition with us as a prospective acquirer.” Jane says, “If we can know the potential alternative buyers for this company, we’ll be in a better position to communicate differentiated value to the target, and explain exactly why we might be an ideal choice."
