Читать книгу The Private Equity Toolkit - Tamara Sakovska - Страница 33

This step enables you to understand the market structure, evaluate what competitive forces are at play and benchmark the companies against each other as well as against best-in-class peers. You may also be able to discover valuable second-order effects from this exercise, such as identifying suppliers or customers of the industry that may be interesting deal targets in their own right. In every industry analysis, I find that some companies can be difficult to research because they may represent smaller subsidiaries of big publicly listed enterprises or may already be owned by private equity or big strategic conglomerates. Private companies, as a rule, do not disclose many details of their operations. Ideally, you should aim to gather enough data to cover the following areas:

 Company overview. This section should include a business overview, description of products or services, market share, strategic positioning, high-level financials, ownership details and any recent company news.

 Benchmarking. What are the key operating statistics for each company? How do they compare to direct competitors and global best-in-class peers? Are you able to assess the key success factors for companies operating in this industry? Are there companies that you have identified in the sector that went out of business recently? Are you able to understand why?

There are several ways I typically go about gathering the necessary information. To the extent that there are public companies in this universe, locating recent equity research reports can help you gain insight into the company itself, as well as its peer group and global competitors. Public equity research reports also help you to get up to speed on what operating metrics are used in the sector.

Other useful sources for mapping out who is active in the sector are participant lists of relevant trade fairs and industry award ceremonies, membership directories of leading industry associations as well as speakers and sponsors at industry conferences. Another option is to conduct a search through a paid-for company intelligence database that allows you to narrow down potential targets by industry classification, geography, company description, shareholder details and keywords. While potentially expensive, these databases provide comprehensive information on both public and private companies that includes key financials and recent developments, such as ownership changes.