Mitchell Presser and Marcia Ellis spoke to Mergers & Acquisitions about M&A activity in 2022, predicting that technology-enabled competitiveness and meeting ESG (environmental, social, and governance) goals are the name of the game for this year's deals.
"We had done a survey a few months ago on where dealmakers are looking at deals, and two out of three most common answers were customer data management and business intelligence/analytics," Mitchell said. "That's using tech to create better solutions for your customers, to better sell, or manage their business relationships."
Marcia added: "Internet data centers are great private equity businesses in that they need endless capital going into them, so you need real pools of capital to expand. In certain areas of the world, Latin America, Asia, we're nowhere near saturation point. But data centers use a large percentage of energy, [and] as a private equity firm, you can go in there and change where they get their electricity, and that can be an ESG transformation. PE funds are going in and figuring out a way to make a company more efficient."
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