Four-Company Merger: Sector Analysis in an Uncharted Market

Sanjeevni was supporting a mid-market M&A transaction at OneBridge that involved merging four companies operating in a niche Australian government infrastructure sector: specifically, machinery and services enabling road and infrastructure hygiene for the Australian government.

The first challenge was that no direct peer companies existed. The sector was too specialized for standard comparable company analysis. Rather than defaulting to a generic benchmark, she ran S&P and Bloomberg reports on the broader sector, then identified four to five companies that each provided a partial subset of the services the merged entity would offer. One firm manufactured the trucks; another manufactured only the brushes installed in the machinery. By assembling these partial comparables, she constructed a credible peer set.

The second challenge was the data itself. She received approximately 1,000 entries of scattered data from the managing director, including competitor information, financial figures, and sector references, much of it in image format. She used an AI tool, approved by the MD, to process the volume, then manually reviewed and corrected entries where figures were too blurry for the tool to read accurately.

The cleaned dataset was compiled into a structured Excel model with pivot tables, enabling the MD to extract growth ratios, expense projections, and combined net worth estimates for the merged entity. The figures fed directly into the information memorandum and pitch deck used to close the deal.