Despite the global downturn in the M&A sector both in terms of total deals and deal values, the Baltic M&A sector has moved in the opposite direction – 222 deals were announced during the year, where at least one of the parties in the deal represents a Baltic State, which is by 19% more than last year. It must be noted that Latvian companies are becoming more attractive in the eyes of investors, outperforming Lithuania and approaching Estonia in terms of announced M&A deals.
An even more impressive increase was in the accumulated value of publicly available M&A deals, reaching 1.9 bnEUR in 2017, which is 55% more than in 2016. Vilniaus prekyba group was particularly active among Baltic companies, whose M&A total deal value in 2017 reached 454 mEUR.
Authors of Prudentia M&A Folio consider that the “quietest”, but the most important for the Latvian economy were two related M&A deals, which were announced during last days of year 2017. As a result of these deals JSC "Augstsprieduma Tīkls", owned by Latvian State, has become the largest shareholder of AS "Conexus Baltic Grid", a natural gas transmission and storage infrastructure operator, post transaction owning a 34.36% stake. Although the deal value was not announced, the publicly available information is sufficient enough to determine the provisional market value of the 34.36% stake of AS “Conexus Baltic Grid” in the range of 70 – 75 mEUR, thus ranking this deal as one of the largest among Baltic M&A deals in 2017.
It is possible to read the full Prudentia M&A Folio here: Prudentia M&A Folio