Alacra Releases First Annual Analysis Of M&A Intelligence On The Web

Jan. 7, 2011 - PRLog -- New York  –  Alacra today released the results of its first annual analysis of merger and acquisition activity as aggregated by Alacra Pulse, a company event-detecting business news filter. The analysis examined the full year of 2010 M&A developments reported by some 3,000 carefully vetted traditional news sources and blogs.

Among the key findings:

•  Although M&A rumors are rampant in financial markets, only a small percentage of deal transactions are preceded by publicly circulated rumors.
•  The Technology industry accounted for 210 or 17.5% of the 1196 Deal Ideas picked up by Alacra Pulse, but only 10.8% of the 6,231 announced or completed deals.
•  Utilities represented about 0.5% of the Deal Ideas but over 2% of the “done deals”, while Construction and Real Estate accounted for 0.75% of the total ideas but 3.3% of the total deals.
•  Technology was the only industry in which the number of deal ideas exceeded the number of rumors, with a ratio of 1.23 to 1 compared with a ratio of 0.08 to 1 for utilities and 0.11 to 1 for Construction/Real Estate.
•  The number of Retail companies mentioned in rumors was about half the number of announced or completed deals, whereas in Technology the ratio was only 0.14 to 1.
•  Technology companies accounted for 7% of all rumors but almost 11% of all deals.
•  Likely driven by the widespread speculation about industry consolidation following the financial crisis, the Financial Services industry had by far the largest raw number of rumors at 518 involving 210 companies, representing almost 17% of the total for all industries.

Pulse reported a total of 6,231 deals that were publicly announced or completed during 2010. There were 1,196 Deal Ideas and 2,892 Rumors, involving 1,258 companies.

Alacra Pulse's unique approach of tagging Deal Ideas and Rumors serves as an early warning of potential deals and also allows for monitoring of the accuracy of those ideas.

“As deal volume continues its uptick, bankers, corporate executives, and investment professionals want an information edge,” commented Steven Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, Inc. “Pulse combs the web, pinpoints reliable sources, and offers an easy way of filtering M&A developments. With a combination of semantic analysis and human editorial oversight, Alacra Pulse provides a cost-effective alternative to existing intelligence gathering techniques.”

M&A Deal Ideas can come from sell-side analysts based on their financial or other analysis of the companies and industries they follow. They can also come from industry experts and bloggers who offer informed opinions on what mergers or takeovers make sense to them.

Deal Ideas often move into the rumor stage and sometimes into an announced or done deal. Pulse makes it easy to track potential Deal Ideas all the way through. Many are documented in the daily "In Play Today" feature on the Pulse Check blog (http://pulse.alacra.com/blog/).

Readers are encouraged to visit http://pulse.alacra.com for a free 2-week trial of the service.

About Alacra, Inc.

Alacra develops workflow solutions that enable 300,000 end users at financial institutions, professional services firms and corporations to search for, extract, match and analyze mission-critical business information.  

Alacra has under license the largest collection of premium business information in the world and continuously collects business data and financial events from a hand-curated universe of 3,000+ web-based sources. Alacra aggregates and filters this content; each configuration offers users a single point of access to disparate information sources. Bespoke applications keep Alacra's clients up-to-date on their customers, prospects, investments, competition, partners and suppliers, driving business development and streamlining operations.

Alacra’s mission is to aggregate, integrate, package and deliver business and financial content in ways that are most useful to our clients, which include nine of the top 10 global investment banks, all four major accounting firms, and nine of the top 10 consulting firms.

For more information, visit www.alacra.com.

For press inquires and interviews, please contact:
Helena Plater-Zyberk
Vice President, Marketing
T: 212-806-3891
E: helena.pz@alacra.com