M&A activity remained slow through most of 2023, but various catalysts have the potential to start encouraging dealmakers to come off the sidelines in 2024. Potential stability in rates, pent-up demand and pushes to consolidate or divest in certain industries may drive an uptick in the outlook for M&A activity.

Financial sponsors have plenty of cash for acquisitions. Global private equity (PE) dry powder at midyear 2023 stood at a record $2.49 trillion U.S., up more than 11% since the close of 2022. PE-backed deal value fell more year over year than deal volume through the first eight months of 2023, however, an indication that fund managers were targeting smaller deals because of the higher cost of leverage.

This Asia-based PE firm is focused on early stage, deep-tech start-ups in selected industries in the region. Given growing PE activity with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the investment team wanted to shore up its analytical capabilities to more efficiently screen for opportunities, analyze financials, assess comps and complete realistic valuations. 

Pain Points

Members of the investment team lacked the market intelligence and analytical tools needed for effective fundraising, specifically in the private market space. They were also using multiple data providers, which was inefficient and made it difficult to reconcile information from these different sources. They wanted to find a more holistic solution that could provide:

1. Both public and private company data to help screen for companies, evaluate financials, look at comps and understand appropriate valuations.
2. Insights to target limited partners (LPs) investing in APAC funds that aligned with their verticals of interest.
3. Details to quickly identify contacts at these firms.
4. Broker research to assist with testing investment hypothesis and conducting market sizing activities.

The company contacted S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") to discuss available services.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence spoke about the challenges and opportunities in the PE market and how detailed information available on S&P Capital IQ Pro, a powerful one-stop desktop solution, could help the investment team:

	Efficiently access extensive data	S&P Capital IQ Pro is a powerful web-based platform that provides access to an unrivaled breadth and depth of data, productivity tools, news and research. Dashboards, data visualization tools and robust search capabilities enable users to quickly uncover valuable insights.
	Understand ongoing activity in the alternative assets space	The Preqin dataset is available on S&P Capital IQ Pro and provides analytics and research on the PE and venture capital (VC) industries. This supports fundraising, investor relations, asset allocation, portfolio management, fund manager selection, business development and more. This dataset includes: Fundraising and dry powder. Fund performance metrics. Profiles for funds, fund managers and institutional investors.
	See the market's view about industries and companies	The Aftermarket Research collection is also available on S&P Capital IQ Pro and features 35 million reports from 1,800+ global investment research providers,[1] including small- to middle-market brokers and top-ranked investment banks, such as Citi, Credit Suisse, Barclays, UBS, J.P. Morgan, HSBC and Deutsche Bank. The offering helps users gain essential perspectives on the companies, sectors and industries they track. Searches can be saved for quick retrieval, and users can learn about a report of interest before downloading, using precision search capabilities to evaluate relevancy, document thumbnails and more. In addition, users can: Undertake smart searches with the AI-powered Doc Viewer to quickly surface documents and insights from leading research analysts. Extract tables to work In Excel. Leverage Kensho NERD (Named Entity Recognition Disambiguation) to identify company names and aliases mentioned during earnings calls and determine the location in a transcript. Organize downloads using batch preview, print and download functions. Monitor the information of most interest by creating saved searches and email alerts. Use mobile apps for smartphones and iPads to access the latest research and stay connected to markets and companies.

Key Benefits

Members of the investment team saw S&P Capital IQ Pro as a powerful platform to access and efficiently analyze extensive quantities of data, and they subscribed to the services discussed. They are now benefiting from being able to:

1. Research prospective investments, identify buyers, co-investors and intermediaries, and assess the market size and growth of companies across various sectors with intelligence on 52M+ private companies around the globe.
2. Explore insights on 72k+ public company profiles, including deal information, estimates and extensive data on people and markets worldwide.
3. Access fund profiles, contacts, fundraising, performance, deals and exits associated with PE and VC firms.
4. View a conclusive list of LPs with contact information to prospect and understand their holdings and associated fund allocations.
5. Quickly gain access to millions of analyst reports from well-known brokerage houses and market research providers to obtain in-depth company and industry analyses.
6. Preview thumbnail views of an Aftermarket Research report before downloading to understand the content and layout.
7. Compare Aftermarket Research reports with a unique side-by-side preview capability to assess the different views of analysts.

Click here to learn more about the datasets mentioned in this Case Study.

^{*Coverage numbers as of January 2024.}