Vendors and their sellside advisors have just one or two weeks left to launch European auctions if they hope to close before Christmas. The pool of potential deals is large: over a third of all auctions tracked by Mergermarket are sitting in the pre-launch stage.

Roughly 200 auctions tracked in the UK, DACH, Italy, France and the Benelux are yet to go live, despite many tapping banks at least six months ago. These include the carve-out of Fortius IBA from Elysian Capital-backed Raymond Brown; the sale of a stake in Brentford FC; and founder-owned Your World Recruitment.

Mergermarket has re-launched its proprietary Auctions tracking platform. The tool, fed by proprietary and aggregated intelligence, holds in one place ongoing, lapsed and realised exits via auctions, alongside records of their advisors, the timeline, financials, bidders and more.

Longer and longer

The period between appointing an advisor and launching a sale process has lengthened over the past couple of years.

In a period of easier M&A, vendors would have capitalised on momentum to go out quickly with materials but are now often taking months to hold soft talks for assessing conviction, ensure thorough due diligence, and await better trading numbers and macroeconomic conditions.

To look at a handful of the exits that have launched since the summer break: Netzkontor backer DBAG and Hippo Digital’s owner GCP both mandated a sellside back in February; while Motion Equity tapped a bank for Olyos in May.

It is not just the pre-launch stage that is getting longer but the entire auction process, as bidders take time to do their own diligence and figure out financing, the parameters of sale processes change and vendors may need to hold refresh bids.

Around half of the tracked auctions that have been announced as realised in the past two weeks took longer than six months – the standard timeline of yester-year. Sanofi’s [EPA:SAN] complex carve-out of its consumer health arm to CD&R, which marks the biggest private-equity investment in Europe this year, took nearly a year from initial advisory appointment to announcement.

Some are still managing to hold quick exits. NorthEdge’s sale of Helios to Telemos Capital took around five months, while Oakley Capital’s exit of WindStar to trade lasted around six.

To 2025

Most in the industry are now in preparation mode for what might go live in the next launch window early next year. EQT’s Karo Healthcare, Progressio’s PolenghiFood, and Five Arrow’s Softway Medical are, among others, tipped as 1Q or 2Q launches, while Armonia’s Arrigoni and Horizon Capital’s Dains Accountants could join them later in the year.

Assuming that at least four months is now a relatively common run-up between advisory appointment to launch, then there are over 100 processes that could move from pre-launch to Round 1. The biggest include Palamon’s MyDentist, Castik Capital’s AddSecure and White Bridge Investment’s Named.

Whether a few or all these launch, will depend partly on how well the processes that are live develop. To find out, visit Auctions.