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Maximilian Ludwig and Julian Rasten are both Master of Finance students from the class of 2017 and wrote this blog post together.
We (Max & Julian) were two of the lucky “chosen” ones who attended this year´s 10th anniversary of the German-speaking M&A and Private Equity Conference at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management – which normally is a professionals-only event. Although we were looking forward to experiencing different types of presentations, in the end both of us were highly impressed by all orators, speeches and discussions. The range of professionals was so diverse, from managers of Tier 1 Frankfurt-based investment banks to countryside “Mittelstand”M&A up to enthusiastic entrepreneurs of the shiny Berlin Venture Capital scene –literally everyone attended the conference. It is not a big surprise that given the diversity of different orators highly active discussions about various topics were about to take place….
But what kind of topics did they talk about? Well for instance, cross-border transactions, trends in the current market or digitalisation of the transactions business. Well, you are probably thinking “Hmm, so the same as always…”, but believe us, the key note speeches were as much entertaining as the panel discussions were catchy. Why? Maybe because we were watching top managers from Lazard, Partners of Freshfields and Executive Managers of BASF having heated discussions amongst each other. We don´t know about you, but we never expected to have such an opportunity. Therefore, take your chance next time!
To give you the best possible impression of the conference, we thought the easiest way is to tell you about our preferred topics. I (Julian), for example, was interested in what´s happening right now in the market and what these glamourous speakers thought about the current situation. “Deutschland geht shoppen” (Germany goes shopping) was my personal favourite podium discussion with Lazard, Barclays, BASF, NORMA Group and Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (Private Equity) – nice composition, no? My recommendation is for all of you to read the news beforehand to get a grasp of what’s been happening recently– you will understand the dynamics of the discussions much better.
Hmm… doesn´t this sound interesting? Well, personally for me (Max), another lecture was much more fascinating. I am talking about the one by Jörg Asmussen, Managing Director at Lazard, who talked about the influence of politics on cross-over deals. I admit, when you read the topic in the beginning it doesn’t sound too thrilling, however he gave an insight to a topic that at least I have never covered in any class before. To be honest, I never even considered that politics might play such an important role during a M&A transaction. He highlighted however, several aspects as to why a government might block a transaction by referring to current and past deals such as the highly discussed one of KUKA and Midea. I don´t know how it would have been in your case, but in mine he managed to change my view about how much you have to consider external factors such as politics when you want to seal the deal.
We hope we have at least been able to show you a little of how impressed were with the conference. To be honest we could have written a whole novel about all the covered topics, the exciting discussion rounds and so on. But we don´t want anyone of you to read a whole novel, therefore we just leave you with this short blog and highly recommend you to check out the conference in 2017.
And by the way, a nice get-together for either networking or just having some drinks is also included. 😉
Julian Rasten
Master of Finance Class of 2017
Julian joined the FS MoF in 2016. Together with Maximilian he attended the M&A Konferenz a couple of weeks ago.
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