Corporate buyers drove M&A deals in 2014's first quarter

Fueled by strong demand from corporate buyers of smaller companies, the Minnesota deals market picked up in the first quarter.

A strong deals market is viewed as a harbinger of solid economic performance because sellers believe they're getting a good price and buyers, such as strategic corporate buyers and private equity firms, believe business and revenue will continue to grow in an improving economic up-ticking environment.

There may be no better evidence than the fact that Minneapolis-based Piper Jaffray, the investment bank, last week reported that net earnings had risen 75 percent in the first quarter on revenue that jumped 53 percent to $168.1 million.

"The first quarter of this year certainly was much stronger than the first quarter of 2013," said Bruce Engler, the veteran deal lawyer at Faegre Baker Daniels. "In Q1 2013, we were suffering the hangover from deals that were pulled into 2012 to beat the [2013] increase in capital-gains tax rates. But middle-market M&A valuations are currently very high and solid companies are getting strong buyer interest and premium valuations.''

Engler, head of Faegre's M&A practice, represented family-owned Lake Region Medical of Chaska, a maker of medical guide wires for medical-device companies, in its eye-popping, $390 million cash-stock sale to larger Accellent Inc. of Boston. Accellent, also a medical equipment manufacturer, is principally owned by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

Nationally, the value of the 2,399 deals announced in the first quarter totaled $380.5 billion, up from $301.2 billion for the 2,727 done deals in the year-ago quarter — a 26 percent jump. So are prices getting too high?

"I wouldn't describe the M&A market as 'frothy' yet,'' said Engler. "Not enough volume to reach that conclusion. I do think valuations are quite high, though."

And the rest of the global M&A business, particularly in Europe, is starting to blossom.

While the United States continues to stage most of the M&A action with 51 percent of the market by value of deals so far this year, Europe and Asia-Pacific are gradually catching up with 24 percent and 16 percent of the market. Asia-Pacific had the strongest start of the year of any region with announced deals worth $113 billion and 1,751 transaction, according to Thomson Reuters.

And the U.S. may be headed for its busiest M&A year in nearly a decade. Corporate America is sitting on an estimated $3 trillion in cash, optimism is rising in boardrooms, the stock market is resting near all-time highs and there's plenty of low-cost financing available. So investment bankers see pretty good times ahead.

"I feel like we've got a long way to run," said Jamie Frommelt, co-head of M&A at Craig-Hallum Capital Group. "It's a good deal market, especially for sellers of businesses. There's a lot of money out there. And there's a shortage of good companies for sale. Owners still think they can wait and grow a little more [and] get a better price later.''

In Minnesota, the second quarter got off to a fast start, topped by the biggest planned acquisition of the year so far.

Meanwhile, Graco, Ecolab, 3M, U.S. Bancorp, Medtronic and Cargill all announced smaller deals during the first quarter. And several Minnesota companies, public and private, said they raised equity capital during the first quarter.

That included TenKsolar, the Bloomington-based maker of solar electric panels, which said it had received something less than $25 million from the GFI Energy Group of Oaktree Capital Management, the big California-based investment group. TenKsolar has raised $25 million in two previous rounds of private funding from local, national and international investors.

Rick Hartfiel, director of investment banking at Craig-Hallum, noted that the first quarter was strong in terms of additional equity raised by existing public companies.

"The real story is the continuation of a very favorable equity market over the past two years without a significant pullback in the market," Hartfiel said.

"The question is whether the pullback in April was a one-month blip or the start of something bigger. We continue to have a very strong backlog of companies wanting to do offerings, but there is no question that investors' quality threshold is higher today than it was six weeks ago. That's why you have seen the most recent IPOs completed in April priced below their expectations."