É tempo para fusões e aquisições?

This year, they are unsure. In 2012 the dollar value of mergers and acquisitions worldwide was flat, reflecting unease in the C-Suite. With share prices now surging and huge cash reserves shouting to be spent, one might expect bosses to feel romantic. But only 28% of chief executives surveyed by PwC, an accountancy firm, said they planned to make one or more acquisitions during 2013, lower than a year earlier. American bosses seemed somewhat perkier, with 42% saying they planned some M&A, but that was the same proportion as in the 2012 survey.

Yet there is anecdotal evidence that these predictions are too low, says Bob Moritz, who runs PwC in America. “From what I’m hearing, if the recent momentum in confidence continues, there may be a lot more merger activity in the second half of the year,” he says.

Some think the M&A cycle has already started to turn up. In the first three quarters of 2012, as the euro tottered and fear gripped the global economy, M&A activity worldwide was 17.4% lower than in the same period of 2011. Yet it surged in the fourth quarter, to the highest level of any quarter in the past four years. This is one reason to expect more mergers this year, says a report by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a law firm that specialises in M&A. However, Mr Moritz suspects that some deals in late 2012 were rushed through by companies that were worried about possible changes to the tax code.

From a financial point of view, conditions now favour deal-making. Credit is cheap. Balance-sheets are unusually strong. Many firms have voluminous cash reserves. Yet bosses remain timid. A bungled acquisition can wreck a career. Boards are far less indulgent than they used to be of imperial chief executives. Having spent the past few years obsessing about risk management, directors may not easily be persuaded to support even straightforward deals.

[...]The market for mates

If M&A activity does pick up, it is likely to involve the kind of cost-saving, margin-boosting deals that have been the norm since the financial crash. Oil-and-gas deals reached an all-time high last year, as companies furiously consolidated. Industries such as banking and professional services seem ripe for something similar. Many firms could become more focused by selling or spinning off non-core businesses. Retailers and makers of consumer packaged goods have already done plenty of this, but could do more.

Most deals in 2013 will probably be fairly small, designed to strengthen or fill a gap in the buyer’s existing operations. These are known as “plug and play”. Transformational megamergers grew rarer in 2012, with only four deals topping $20 billion. That was the same as in 2011, and fewer than in each of the three previous years.

[...]If cash-rich firms cannot find suitable targets to acquire, they should return money to shareholders by raising their dividends or repurchasing shares, Citigroup adds. The report notes that the urge to merge has been soaring, surprisingly, in Japan. In 2012 Japanese firms spent more than $110 billion on 736 overseas acquisitions, four times as many as five years earlier, and second only to firms in America, a much larger economy. With growth at home snail-like, Japanese firms are hunting for opportunities abroad. “The Japanese expansion model offers a potential template for other developed economies,” reckons Citigroup. It has been a while since the rest of the corporate world has taken its lead from Japan, but perhaps the wheel is turning, and with it the M&A cycle.

Fonte: aqui