Mergers and Acquisitions — Deals That Make Sense

“Larger regional companies that wish to grow are easily sucked in as a potential buyer seeking relatively low-cost sales growth,” DeWese says. “They can carve out from 5 to 12 percent in fixed overhead.”

On the whole, DeWese says that today’s deals are being hammered out based on a justifiable material benefit to the buyer’s performance in the near term, as opposed to the “shotgun approach” of the late 1990s. He expects to see the regional M&A trend continue and doesn’t anticipate any mega deals in 2008.