BDO South advises on £1.7bn of completed deals in 2024

The completed deals were across a variety of sectors including technology, business services, and manufacturing & engineering which accounted for more than 75% of completed deals. Key highlights for the team across these sectors included: advising on the cross-border acquisition of Offset Print and packaging by Alzamora Group, the provision of financial and tax due diligence re the sale of the iconic Dorset yacht builder, Sunseeker International, and advising the shareholders of Arrow County Holdings on its sale to Bunzl Plc.

The UK dealmaking environment remained challenging and relatively sensitive to factors such as macroeconomic challenges, pre-election uncertainty and the prospect of a hike in tax rates in the new Government’s first budget in October.

Despite this uncertain and at times volatile backdrop, BDO saw continued resilience in the UK deals market and a key theme was the appetite of private equity and its portfolio companies, in addition to strategic corporates, to continue to successfully execute buy and build strategies.

A number of BDO’s deals advised in the period were cross-border, showing the appeal of UK businesses to those overseas. Private equity and corporate acquirers still have significant capital to deploy and in the main continued to choose to employ this lower risk growth strategy rather than looking to complete more risky platform investments. A shortage of quality platform opportunities also added to that trend.

Private equity was a feature in a number of BDO’s key deals in the South of England, which included advising LDC on their acquisition of LendingMetrics, advising Omni Partners on their acquisition of Compass Continuing Healthcare, financial due diligence on BGF’s investment into Twenty7Tec, advising the management of Watermark on its MBO of Frontier Development Capital and providing vendor and tax due diligence services to support refinancing of Unique X by Katesia (allowing an exit by BGF).

Looking ahead to 2025, the pipeline of deals remains strong across a number of sectors including technology and business services. We anticipate that the greater degree of certainty provided by the change of Government and by the recent budget, coupled with continued cuts to base rate, will drive private equity and corporate deal activity across the South of England.

Duncan Lamb, M&A Partner at BDO said: “We are buoyed by our deal activity in 2024 and have continued optimism heading into 2025. While there remain challenging economic factors at play, the strength and resilience of the mid-market and the entrepreneurial businesses that we work with never ceases to amaze us. As a result, we are expecting activity levels to exceed those we saw in 2024 which is supported by a strong pipeline and our current engagements and continued appetite from both trade and private equity.”

Andy Harris, Transaction Services Partner at BDO added: “By investing in our transaction services and M&A expertise in the local regions, plus offering sector expertise in technology, business services, industrial products and financial services, we have seen considerable deal pipeline from the entrepreneurial businesses we focus on. We expect this to continue into 2025 and beyond.”

Ros Payne, Transaction Tax Partner at BDO added: “We are very proud of our ability to provide a full suite of transaction advisory services in the region – across M&A, transaction services and transaction tax. With an ever-changing tax landscape in the UK and overseas, helping businesses, their owners and key employees to navigate a transaction remains at the heart of what we do. We are very excited about what the rest of 2025 will bring!”