Doing deals in the CEE Webinar: 2020 Review and 2021 Preview

If the audience members of DLA Piper’s webinar "Doing deals in the CEE: 2020 Review and 2021 Preview” on 10 February are right, then there will be an increase in deal volumes in 2021 across the CEE region.

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Leading partners from across DLA Piper’s CEE regional offices Marian Dinu (Romania), Jakub Domalik-Plakiwicz (Poland), Michaela Stessl (Slovakia), Miroslav Dubovsky (Czech Republic) and Gabor Molnar (Hungary) formed the panel, which was moderated by European Head of Private Equity, Tim Wright. They provided the audience with both an overview of the M&A market in their jurisdictions, as well as offering suggestions towards what may be expected in those markets over the next year.

The panel were joined by an audience from across various industries, from banking and investment to energy and pharmaceuticals, who also provided their own thoughts and predictions on the M&A market across the CEE region in the year ahead.

Both the local market knowledge of the panel and the input of the audience gave some interesting and, in some cases unexpected, forecasts and insights:

• Transaction difficulty: Transactions in Slovakia are expected to become more difficult once the amendment to the act on critical infrastructure is approved and comes into effect. In contrast, in Romania the deal doing environment has become easier.
• Jurisdiction matters: While the panel gave a CEE overview of the M&A market they also provided local insight which highlighted some of the differences to be expected across the region, such as the use of W&I insurance.
• A buyer’s market is coming?: The audience provided a fairly optimistic view on deal terms for buyers during 2021, with only 9,1% predicting that they will get worse. Next year the hard statistics from one of the world’s largest global databases will show which way the pendulum actually swung between buyers and sellers.
• Deal drivers: Over 50% of the audience expect PE dry power to be the biggest factor for driving deal activity in the CEE region in the year ahead. While the high percentages for PE dry powder was not unexpected, the panel were split over the influence distressed M&A’s will have over the next 12 months and were relatively surprised that none of the audience perceived Corporate spin-offs as being a frontrunner for deal activity this year.

As well as highlighting local market aspects for people to be aware of, such as common issues or reasons for delays, the team also shared the findings of their Global M&A in 2020: Impact of COVID-19 proprietary report.

A copy of both the webinar recording and Global M&A in 2020: Impact of COVID-19 proprietary report are available upon request*.

*Please note that requests for this webinar recording from other law firms will not be processed.