Commercial Due Diligence:

A Guide to Reducing Risk in Acquisitions
Financial Times Executive Briefings Series


By Denzil Rankine
Financial Times / Pearson Education
June 1999
ISBN: 0-273-63971-4
160 Pages
$247.50 paper original


Every business has plenty of information, but do you have the right information when you need it? Executive Briefings concentrate on delivering actionable information, designed to help executives ask the right questions, make the right decisions and take the right action. Whatever the opportunity or challenge that your business faces, an Executive Briefing will give you the insight to evaluate the situation and the tools to implement change.

Mergers and acquisitions are at an all time high, yet the evidence is that half of all acquisitions fail in one way or another. You can reduce the risks involved by applying commercial due diligence. An effective due diligence programme can help you negotiate better, prepare for integration, complement financial due diligence and aid effective valuation.

This briefing offers an in-depth, practical account of how commercial due diligence can help you minimise risk and avoid disaster. Extensive use of case studies, charts and checklists ensure that the report is a highly effective guide to the process, relevant to any industry and any scale of acquisition.

Contents include:
Preparation
In-house versus out-of-house
Published and non-published information sources
Case studies on market quantification and market trends
Conducting analysis
Reporting
Using the output
Vendor due diligence

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