Samil, Goldman top M&A partners

By Kim Tae-gyu

Samil PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), Korea’s foremost accounting company, and Goldman Sachs, a global investment banking and securities firm, have been selected as the best partners in the nation’s merger and acquisition (M&A) business.

The Bell, a local financial information service provider, released its survey of 19 companies and private equity funds, which have been through M&As over the past five years, including Lotte, Posco, Daewoo International, STX and Doosan.

Out of five qualitative criteria of advisory capacity, synergy analysis, valuation, deal structuring and manpower, Samil topped in the first three areas and ranked second in manpower evaluation.

``On the strength of unrivaled workforces, Samil has a competitive advantage in due diligence. This helped the corporation overwhelm its rivals in valuation and price coordination,’’ an analyst at The Bell said.

``Currently, Samil maintains a total of eight dedicated divisions for M&A, which accommodate up to 500 specialists. A corporate interviewee appreciated the fact that Samil offered objective services without regard to the success of the deal.’’

The outfit added that such a competitive edge saw Samil take charge of 10 M&A deals during the first six months of this year, the largest among 26 domestic or global M&A houses.

Goldman Sachs remained ahead of the pack in terms of manpower and ranked No. 2 in the advisory capacity and deal structuring, trailing Samil PWC and Hana Daetoo Securities, respectively.

Hana Daetoo, the brokerage arm of the Hana Financial Group, garnered the most votes in deal structuring.

Asked about what was the single-most important criterion in selecting an M&A partner, 34 percent of respondents opted for deal sourcing capacity followed by deal structuring ability with 26 percent.

``Most financial service providers decide the best M&A partners in line with the size of their deals,’’ the analyst said.

``This is not fair because such a survey cannot mirror the satisfaction of the clients. Accordingly, we adopted a qualitative method of interviewing investment banks and the customers. The result ― Samil and Goldman were ahead of the curve.’’

The Bell comes up with the M&A survey every three months and the first-half result was disclosed in the its latest edition of its journal, the Bell Insight, which was published earlier this month.