For the first time: Valuation Advisors adds foreign transactions

BVWireIssue #110-1
November 2, 2011

Exciting news from the Valuation Advisors Lack of Marketability Discount Study: We’ve just added 867 new deals to the database, including—for the first time—757 international transactions from 26 countries, with a median revenue of $42 million. China tops the list of new foreign transactions, making the current breakdown by countries (top 10):

Country

Count

United States
7,624

China

426

Israel

103

United Kingdom

41

Korea

22

Canada

21

Netherlands

17

France

14

Taiwan

14

Argentina

12

Hong Kong

11

Digging deeper into the data, “although we haven’t statistically analyzed the relationship between U.S. and international DLOMs,” says Brian Pearson, president of Valuation Advisors, the general trend appears to parallel results from the domestic data; that is, “the international discounts tend to increase over time from the IPO date,” he says. Predictably, analysts will want to use the international data when valuing international companies or a company that has a considerable portion of its sales, earnings, or operations overseas, using new tools that permit searches by aggregate or individual country, in addition to the existing search parameters for U.S. companies.

At the same time, “If you are trying to calculate discounts by industry or for a particular time period only, you may want to use all the companies (foreign and domestic) in the database,” Pearson suggests, noting that with over 9,000 transactions—2,487 added this year alone—Valuation Advisors is currently the “largest valuation discount database in the world.”

Please let us know if you have any comments about this article or enhancements you would like to see.