Carbohydrates Acquisition Strategy

In this case study, an ingredients company engaged CPL Business Consultants to develop an acquisition strategy for its carbohydrates business. CPL characterised the markets, profiling and ranking around 60 potential acquisition targets and recommending the most suitable targets for the client based on its strategic fit.

Inorganic Growth Strategy

The objective was to develop a growth strategy by acquisition for the carbohydrates business of a global food ingredients company.

There are a variety of strategic approaches to acquisitions used by companies and consultants. Most of these involve some fairly extensive analysis of the Company, its objectives and its strengths. This is followed by attempts to match these criteria with acquisition candidates identified by some fairly extensive surveying of the fields of available companies.

In our experience, this approach creates quite a lot of work for business development departments and/or consultants but rarely produces a result worthy of the effort.

CPL believes it is better to move forward by a series of iterations, in effect, some intuitive guesses combined with relatively superficial analysis until the prospects begin to ‘feel right’. The reason this is so important is that it is always the individuals in the Company that has to make the acquisition work. If it doesn’t feel right early on, we suspect that no amount of analysis will make it feel any better later.

Investigation and analysis can separate several good possibilities as part of a diligent investigation of the acquisition and a plan for its assimilation. Acquisitions are considered to be a quick way to growth, a way of entering hitherto unfamiliar markets or of acquiring additional products, but as clients may know, acquisitions can be much more destructive than anticipated if done without adequate forethought.