Buying or selling internationally:
getting a cross-border M&A deal right

On the buy side, consolidation now plays out at European level: the target that perfectly complements your offering may be in Germany, Italy or Spain — and it will not appear in any French database. On the sell side, limiting yourself to domestic buyers means cutting back the competition: for a foreign group looking for an entry point into the French market, your company is worth its strategic position, not just its multiples. Between these opportunities and you stand some very real obstacles: language; different market practice — valuation, warranty and governance conventions vary markedly from one country to another; distance, which makes trust harder to build; and, above all, identifying the right counterparties without a local network.

A successful cross-border deal combines two disciplines. First, openness: sourcing run simultaneously across several countries, approaches conducted in the counterparty's own language — a German business owner is rarely won over in halting English — and materials (teaser, information memorandum) designed for readers who know neither your home market nor its benchmarks. Second, adaptation: the deal structure must take into account the taxation of cross-border flows, the warranty mechanisms customary in the counterparty's country and, where relevant, the foreign investment screening regimes that apply to sensitive sectors. Ignoring these differences does not make talks fail at the start; it makes them fail at the end, when everyone has already invested heavily.

Our semantic scouting works in several languages: it identifies relevant targets and buyers beyond local databases, where conventional searches stop at language borders. Our partner network covers 120 countries and gives us, market by market, the knowledge of local practice and players that saves months. Our team conducts approaches and negotiations in French, English and German — and throughout the process you deal with a single point of contact who orchestrates everything: one thread, several countries. This is what allows an SME or mid-cap to run an international deal with the same control as a domestic one, without building an in-house M&A team.