Inside the Biggest M&A Deals You Need to Know (Goldman Sachs, AkzoNobel, Papa John, WPP)

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast. A new week, so some new deals to review from the past week. And 3 things we're going to talk about. We'll do a roundup of the big transactions on our radar and also a few viewer requested stories. Papa John is in there. Last week I learned about you, Piers, something that I didn't know, which was you're a McDonald's over BK man. Although I did see Gordon Ramsay, uh, on an advert for Burger King. He said it's his favorite burger. So who's got a bet? Who's got a better palate, Gordon Ramsay or Piers Curran?

Well, listeners, uh, what's that? Papa John's loyalty.

So, so this week it's Papa John's or Domino's?

Neither.

Oh, come on. I know you're a highbrow kind of guy, but if you need to get down and dirty—

I honestly, I don't think I've ever had a Papa John's.

Oh, good. I'm a Papa John's all day and Sunday. Love Papa John's.

I don't know what that says about me, but I'm sourdough, sourdough pizza from the bread stall on Northcote Road.

You're so out of touch with the people. Okay, so that we'll talk about. We did have some questions about that deal, Papa John and Apollo deal, the investment fund, but then also Goldman Sachs M&A outperformance. Goldman's has pulled away in the league tables coming towards the end of the year, of course, so we'll have a quick recap of some of their flagship deals that have earned them those fee, those fees, and why its advisory flywheel is spinning so hard this year from a strategic point of view. And then the deep dive for this episode is the AkzoNobel, uh, Axalta merger. That's $25 billion. So it's called a coatings tie-up. This is basically Dulux if you're in the UK. So, so paint, um, what the combined company looks like. Why this attempt at a merger of equals is landing now after it failed just several years ago back in 2017. So a quick run through some of the main headlines first, and then we'll get on to Goldman's. Palo Alto Networks is buying observability— this is real tongue twisters here that we've got, so I'll start that again. Palo Alto Networks is buying observability platform Chronosphere in a cash and stock transaction, $3.35 billion. This is all about aiming to bolt Chronosphere's cloud-native observability stack on its AI-powered Agentix engine so it can go from dashboards to real-time. So very much on the themes of our recent conversations on the AI side. So this is that kind of software part. One you might be familiar with, Piers, Topgolf Callaway is selling a 60% stake in Topgolf business to private private equity firm, uh, Leonard Green, in a deal that values Topgolf at about $1.1 billion and gives Callaway roughly $770 million in net proceeds to refocus on golf equipment and apparel, pay down debt, and return capital to shareholders. Advisors on that deal, it does include Goldman's as well as Centerview Partners. Uh, Leonard Green advisors are Moelis. And then the final 3 here on the quick run-through. TotalEnergies is investing $6 billion to buy 50% of a European power plant portfolio from the Czech investor EPH, all-stock deal, valuing EPH's stake at €5.1 billion. So this is all about using gas plants, batteries, and some biomass to ramp up electricity generation and accelerate free cash flow. So this is kind of that big long-term bet around electronic vehicles and of course AI data centers. Uh, then the fourth deal, J&J, they're buying Halder Therapeutics, just over $3 billion cash, adding Halder's platform for oral targeted oncology drugs and its lead prostate cancer candidate. So this is all about strengthening J&J's cancer pipeline, uh, even though the deal will dilute 2026 adjusted EPS. So if you didn't catch last week's episode, that was all focused on pharma and Pfizer. It's interesting here, just the value of these key drugs when these pipelines are coming to an end. And so they're willing to take a hit almost to get advantage on that lead prostate cancer candidate. Then the final one, I'm sat beside my marketing team to my right-hand side. Uh, they'll like this one. Adobe is acquiring Simrush for $1.9 billion, all cash. Picking up its SEO and AI-powered marketing platform so it can help people like them, the chief marketing officers, track how their brands show up not just in traditional search but across LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity as part of Adobe's wider AI push. So that'd be quite cool. I'd definitely like to see that dashboard for sure. It feels a bit invisible at the moment when you're trying to track stuff. And Google Analytics seems quite archaic these days now when you look at it in terms of people's behaviors shifting. Centiview Partners are the advisor on Semrush. Okay. Just very quickly, a quick response to some questions. We do love a good question. So if you're listening on YouTube or Spotify, I know you do have that function. So just, just hit us up. But this is one where, uh, Salvaba on YouTube said about Papa John's Apollo deal, Dave's Hot Chicken 2.0, let's hear about it. So, you know, you asked, we provide. So the deal here, very summary, short form. Apollo had an offer to take Papa John's private at $64 a share, valued it at just over $2 billion. It was kind of pitched as a kind of fix it in private play. and this coming from the model that they had deployed with Dave's Hot Chicken, which we covered on this show a few months back. Uh, what happened about a week ago before earnings? Apollo basically walked away. They decided the numbers and the backdrop didn't justify that price. Papa John's fell over 20%, and it just sliced their market cap to around $1.3 billion. You know you like that, Piers. Uh, so why did that happen? Why did they pull out? Consumer spending soft, fast casual kind of is, is a little bit shaky at the moment. Papa John's has some real operational issues, unit closures, restructuring, weak earnings. In summary, $64 is just too rich given how big a fix-up job you'd need to do on this, this company. Um, so as things stand, other PE names are still circling, but not at the same price Apollo was. So Dave's Hot Chicken 2.0 is on ice for the moment. And then the final question before we get to Goldman's is from, uh, Benedikt Tamp on Spotify. It's funny, isn't it? People on social never have their real names. It's always like these tongue twisters. Uh, they said they'd love to hear something about WPP. If you're American, you might not necessarily be aware of them. They're pretty well known in the UK. They're kind of a British media institution, almost. WPP. They've become an acquisition target. And the reason why, if they've fallen, I didn't even realize this, 63% in the last year, which is pretty crazy. So it's been a brutal year for WPP. They plunged about nearly 20% in a single day after another Q3 downgrade. And they're trading at levels not seen since 1998. Check this out. Their market cap of roughly $3 billion. It was $25 billion pre-COVID. I mean, that has gone severely, severely wrong. So the collapse in value, repeated profit warnings, client losses, lagging importantly for all businesses in AI data capabilities. Yeah, that's the key. That's hurt them big time. Um, so it's put them on the brink of a FTSE ejection, FTSE 100 index actually. Um, so reports are that Havas has internally discussed a bid, and of course Apollo, back again, KKR, uh, have run the numbers on their assets, uh, even if any formal offers haven't materialized. And Havas is now publicly downplaying talks at this point in time. So shares have risen about 5 to 10%. The takeover chatter, uh, but this is still a deeply out-of-favor asset at the moment. So potentially one to watch at the moment.

Um, that's, uh, Martin Sorrell, of course, or Sir Martin, I should say. Basically, I can't— he kind of— he actually made a small acquisition to start the company off, but it was in like 1985, and then he kind of built it into this mega global, but importantly old school, like traditional kind of marketing advertising shop. Um, yeah, it's just not, not gotten on this AI train. And so yeah, it's getting left behind.

Yeah. And I think I've got a few friends who work in the industry in media, and they're, you know, the consolidation is pretty fierce at the moment. So this kind of bummed out valuation, valuable media arm they still do possess, and sector-wide consolidation is going on. This is more of a target than a turnaround story for sure. So yeah, definitely something's going to happen soon. All right, well, let's go to Goldman's then. So, um, we're getting towards the end of the year. Um, some headlines in the FT earlier this week talking about they're on the brink of their best M&A performance in 24 years. So perhaps you could give us some context on that, that number.

Yeah, I mean, um, obviously the market broadly is firing, uh, eventually. Remember, this is really off the back of Trump and the idea he'd come in and that the regulatory environment would be relaxed. And so, right, deal time. And there being a kind of pipeline of pent-up deals just kind of being held in the queue, uh, waiting and waiting. And we're finally seeing the release of that. It's, it's later than we thought it was going to just because of Trump's tariff chaos earlier in the year, but really second half of this year, it's really started to, to motor. So look, conditions market-wide are very strong, and actually we're looking at about $3.8 trillion worth of deals, um, for this year, which will be the best year since the, the boom year that we had post-COVID in 2021. Um, so that's the broad conditions, and, and Goldman's are really kind of making hay here. They're the ones that are benefiting really more than most, certainly out of the big guns, benefiting more than most from this boom. And actually right now it's quite amazing. They've, they have advised on 34% of global M&A deals by value this year, which is incredible, right? From a market share point of view, obviously you get multiple players advising in one deal. You got the buy-side advisors, you got the sell-side advisors. If it's a big deal, multiple advisors on both sides, right? But still, it's pretty impressive. 34%. That's up from a 28% involvement in, in deal flow by value in 2024. So obviously that's a really positive metric from Goldman's point of view. They're involved in more of the deals. So that's actually the 34%. That's its largest share of deals since 2015. Um, so obviously very strong. Um, the, the kind of general conditions, as I mentioned, have been a key catalyst. And, and, and actually it's the, it's the pharma space in particular. We obviously spoke about this, um, last week, but just generally you're getting a huge number of deals coming through on the pharma side. There's one that's coming late on and hasn't been finalised yet, but Sidara Therapeutics, um, are getting taken over by Merck, one of the big pharma players, and that's a $9.2 billion deal. That deal in itself, I'm pretty sure, literally like a couple of weeks ago, they were talking about $6 billion and now suddenly it's over $9 billion, right? And, um, if Goldman, if that deal does get announced and, and right, it's a go, then that would push them above their 2015 benchmark and actually would be their best year since 2001. 1 for Goldman's. Um, so obviously that's good. Um, so yeah, like, and then in terms of the actual fees that, that they're kind of getting generated, so year to date it has advised on nearly $1.3 trillion worth of M&A deals, and that is outpacing their nearest rival JP by nearly $360 billion. So they're the only ones above the $1 trillion level in terms of deal values that they've advised on, which again is really obviously very impressive. Yeah, and they're kind of, they're tracking for approximately $4.72 billion in advisory revenues for the full year. That's Morgan's. I know they're— so you've got to be careful with these figures, right? They've advised on nearly $1.3 trillion of announced M&A deals. That's the value of the deals. Obviously they're getting a slice and a percentage fee for advising. So when you kind of add up the maths, right, what's the money actually coming in through the door, then we're looking at $4.7 billion for the full year. That's a 34% jump on last year. So yeah, obviously, generally speaking, Uh, very strong.

Um, you mentioned the, um, Sadara Therapeutics, but obviously there's some big ones in the year, namely the biggest was that, well, LBO, the Electronic Arts take private. That, that was a record breaker, an advisory fee, $110 million. Um, the other one was, uh, Kimberly-Clark. So Goldman Centerview advised Kenview on its $48.7 billion cash and stock sale to Kimberly-Clark. That was another mega one. And then Goldman served as one of Baker Hughes' financial advisors on its $13.6 billion acquisition of gas equipment maker Chart Industries. Um, but perhaps then we could just break it down a little bit about, I mean, you mentioned there this widening gulf between a clear outlier and there's like the peloton far behind, if you like, led with JP Morgan. So why is Goldman so unique in this case? What have they done that's allowed them to have that lead on the others?

Well, I think there's a few factors here, but I think, look, whilst the market's been quiet, I guess, well, let's think about it from a CEO's point of view. If you're wanting to do an acquisition or if you're being acquired, But if you want— particularly if you're wanting to kind of lead an acquisition-led growth strategy, well then we are in a pretty volatile environment, right? Trump coming in, tariffs, you know, political risk. And so if you're going to do a deal, you want just a solid, safe pair of hands, you know. You want the, the the guys that have been around the block a million times and know what they're doing. And, and actually, during the quiet years, you know, you're still getting Goldman's maneuver, right? And actually, what they tend to do is they're kind of embedding senior bankers with— onto corporate boards, right? And on, you know, they're onto kind of their private equity sponsors, and they're, they're maneuvering and positioning so that when these big strategic calls come along, you know, like whatever, the EA deal, well then, you know, they're already— they're actually in the room, okay? They're not like, uh, hoping to get called to kind of be a part— they're just part of the conversation from the beginning. And so they're first in line basically to be lead advisors. Um, and yeah, that kind of ties in obviously with then the political sensitivity and cross-border risks. And right, look, Goldman Sachs is a reputable name, you know, across the planet. So their brand is obviously very powerful here. I think they've got a really, what you describe as a deep sector bench. So thinking about their key players in Goldman's, they're firstly cross, you know, specialist teams that cross, you know, obviously the big guns like tech and pharma and energy and financials and all the rest of it. They have got specialist teams that are operating in all of these fields. Um, and that kind of just, I guess, probably makes it easier if you're thinking about pitching complex deals, you know, multi-region transactions. And, you know, you've got to be convincing clients to see both the strategic angles and also then obviously there's execution risks. And, you know, why are Goldman's better than rivals? Well, check out our kind of CV and the deals that we've been involved with down the years and the decades. So they've just kind of got a deep amount of talent, huge track record, amazing brand, you know, positioning strategically so they're right there at the front of the queue when the moment hits. Um, one of the kind of main reasons.

One thing I thought was quite interesting, because we talked about this before, was in terms of the composition of some of these investment bank players. So someone like a, uh, Goldman's is almost as pure play on the bulge bracket side as you'll get. Because you've mentioned before about the emerging kind of the, the split of the pie with Morgan Stanley, and that they have quite a big wealth asset management division as well, whereas JP is, you know, really diverse in terms of it being a global universal bank. But it— that, that's interesting because equity and debt underwriting, so these other departments with in IDB, um, or IBD, being ECM, DCM. They've been squeezed a lot by, as you would imagine, automation, tighter spreads, online trading, these sorts of things. But when it comes to pure, outright, cold-hearted M&A advice, like, unashamed, like high touch, like you said, relationship-driven you know, like you said, when you, you know, when you've got a problem, who you gonna call? You know, not, you call Goldman's. And it seems like in this context of the climate we're in at the moment, where as you said, the deal flow pipeline is, you know, really coming to the boil at the moment and probably some more to come. If interest rates certainly gonna get cut again, looming. Granted that the Nvidia AI if that has a severe shakeout, that might put, you know, that might, that might be a consideration. But at the moment, it would mean that in this condition that they excel, right? But they can, that can be a vulnerability as much as a superpower. Yeah.

Look, they're less, you might say they're less diverse than, as you've said, obviously, certainly JP Morgan, but even arguably Morgan Stanley with Morgan's kind of big kind of wealth management arm. So it's a weakness when the M&A market is dry, which it has been for a few years, but then obviously when the market returns, well, then obviously it's a key strength. You know, Goldman's have always been— they, they sit at the top of the league table when it comes to percentage of M&A deal involvement by value. You look back over the last 25 years, they are pretty much, I think, probably apart from a couple of years just post-crisis where more Morgan Stanley maybe were at the top. Literally, apart from 2 years in the last 25, they're top. So when the market returns and there's perceived risks and you want a safe pair of hands, then you know who you're going to call. Um, and they are absolutely flying.

Okay, so to round it off then as 4 key takeaways on a strategic basis. So it's the flywheel effect. You mentioned deep boardroom relationships that leads ultimately then in the end, good relationships have good value payoffs, mega deal mandates, fat fee backlog as well, compounding into this self-sustaining kind of lead because of the wider environment at the moment. The second thing is mega deals, those ones we mentioned earlier. I mean, these are mega, i.e. CEOs dusting off their $10 billion plus ideas. Goldman's the default lead advisor. League tables, they're pulling away. They're, you know, it's not just about value, deal count. They're leading on both, both fronts at the moment. And then finally, CEOs wanting more capability adding deals, tilting the fee pool towards the kind of the complex advisory work of which Goldman Sachs is kind of known for. So Cool. Well, let's, let's finish then and let's talk about, um, this AxoNobel-Exalta deal. It's called a— and maybe we haven't, you and I discussed one of these types of scenarios before yet, which is an all-stock merger of equals.

Yeah, it's for—

we haven't had that yet.

Yep. I mean, and actually this is, it's an interesting one because often, you know, people mainly were talking about tech, you know, or pharma as we have done, you know, they've perhaps been the big two. Sectors, you might say, from a sort of M&A story, certainly from also from a macro story, obviously technology and the AI boom. And so most column inches are kind of made up of that kind of stuff. So this is a good sort of step sideways into a different world. Um, and this is just the world of paint. And it's just amazing how big these businesses are. You know, this would create, if this goes through, this merger, it would create a $25 $1 billion, um, paint giant. Um, so yeah, it's interesting this. You've got, you've got obviously AkzoNobel on the one side and Axalta on the other. Okay, this would be an all-stock merger of equals. Um, it's not quite equal, it'll be 55-45, but you know, near enough. But all stock, so there's, there's zero cash here, um, which is obviously one benefit to getting a deal done. You don't have the complications of having to add on a whole nother process of raising finance, you know, I don't know, issuing some corporate debt in order to stump up the money for the purchase, right? This is just a share swap. Um, so yeah, you've got these two businesses. Now, what the synergies are pretty interesting. So AkzoNobel, they're a kind of European, well, Dutch headquartered in Amsterdam, and they do paints and coating. And so you can think about the brands like Dulux, which everyone certainly in the UK, um, will be very familiar with. So we're talking about like decorative, consumer-facing type paints. They also do performance and kind of industrial coatings as well, right? So European, like consumer-facing decorative Dulux. Then you got Axalta, US-based, headquartered in Philadelphia. Um, now they're, they're more like coatings for, um, like industrial applications. Think about cars and like commercial vehicles. So they get painted, you know, using Axalta's products. So there's quite a nice mix here of— you've got a kind of geographical sort of synergies here. You've got like product, even though they're both within the paint category. They've got good product diversification through there. And then the important one is cost. So they've actually, as part of this deal, they've identified— they reckon they can save between them $600 million worth of annual cost synergies. And they reckon that— and like, here's— here, obviously, one of the key risks of a deal like this where you've got two massive companies together, they'll be $25 billion, right? Two massive companies coming together, you've got execution risk, you know, can you merge them? Yes, all the clever analysts have said, oh, on paper, well, look, there's $600 million cost synergies there for you, crack on. But for actually getting it done is really difficult. But they're predicting they can see, uh, those $600 million of savings, they can get 90% of those done within 3 years of closing the deal.

Wow, that's crazy, within 3 years.

Yeah, I mean, look, sounds ambitious, um, and so look, yeah, sounds great, but definite risks, um, for sure. But yeah, ultimately they're looking to post-deal, um, create— well, it would be combined, they'd be a $17 billion revenue business with an EBITDA at $3.3 billion. So that'd be a 20% margin. That's kind of once the synergies are delivered, by the way. So we often talk about this idea of pro forma. That just means, hypothetically, if these two companies were merged, bang, straight away with all of the savings done, then what would their combined numbers look like? So they're targeting a pro forma adjusted free cash flow of $1.5 billion per year. Um, so yeah, look, this is, this is the deal. Um, in terms of— we mentioned it's an all-share deal, right? So it's kind of a share swap. So what will happen is Axalta shareholders, they will receive 0.6539 AxoNobel shares for every 1 Axalta share that they own. So it's an absolute pure share-for-share deal, no cash. Axalta— well, I should say Axalta shareholders get zero cash, they just get AkzoNobel shares, right? But AkzoNobel shareholders, they'll obviously just keep their AkzoNobel shares, they'll get diluted, um, as part of the Axalta deal, of course, but they're going to get a dividend, uh, pre the closing of the deal. So it probably looks like AkzoNobel have got some cash sat on their balance sheet. Um, and so there's a dividend payout to the AxoNobel shareholders, a sweetener. Obviously their shareholding's gonna get diluted, but they'll be part of a bigger entity and it'll all wind up, if you do the maths and kind of boil it all down, AxoNobel shareholders will own 55% of the combined business and Axalta will own 45%.

Okay, so just a couple of housekeeping points. Cause then I want to ask you, I said at the top of the show that I think they've tried this before, right? And it failed. So before we get there, those housekeeping points are Morgan Stanley is the sole financial advisor to AkzoNobel. Lazard is actually advising the elite boutique, the supervisory board. And then Exalta is Evercore and JP acting as co-lead financial advisors on that deal. The other point I thought was interesting is this is cross-border. So dual headquarters in Amsterdam and Philadelphia, shares initially dual listed. And then the Yanks, you know, the Yanks win in the end. So the plan is transitioning to a single NYSE listing after a period. So another loss here for Europe in what otherwise is, you know, it's not a small company here. It's just not, maybe not a sexy one, but it's definitely a lost for, for the Dutch in that sense, in terms of a listing perspective in Europe. But explain to me then this, this 2017 failed attempt, and why did it not work then and it worked now?

Well, one last point, sorry, just before we go 2017. The other consideration with these deals, because you've got two businesses operating separately, right? So you've got two CEOs, you've got two CFOs, you've got two of everything. So what happens, like, from a management team perspective executive post-merger is often actually one of the key kind of stumbling blocks to getting these deals done. There's a lot of egos in the C-suite, right? So they've actually agreed that the CEO of the combined business will be the AkzoNobel CEO, Greg Pughiom. The Axalta CEO is going to be deputy CEO of the combined entity. So he's the one who's agreed to kind of just take a little step down here. Um, but perhaps to appease Axalta, it's the Axalta CFO that's going to step up and be the combined CFO, a guy called Carl Anderson. So yeah, there's also that ego thing in that management team. It can literally, that can be on its own, just the thing that kills the deal. Um, but look, looks like they've sorted it out. But yeah, but it's interesting. It's a bit like déjà vu here, because 8 years ago, and it was actually in November 8 years ago in 2017, that these two were talking. And, you know, it kind of makes sense, like, from a consolidation play, because at the moment, I think they're, they're, I think they're third. I've forgotten my stats now. I think AkzoNobel are third in terms of the largest player globally in this kind of paint industry. I believe Axalta might be 4th or 5th, um, you might fact-check me on that, but the combined entity will go 2nd. So it's very much a kind of— obviously lots of synergies as well, but it's like the combined powerhouse will then step up the rung in terms of the big global players. So it kind of, kind of makes sense that these two are talking, given the, the kind of nice dovetail synergies we've, we've spoken about. But in 2017 there were a few other things in the mix as to why they were talking. It wasn't just a straight out, ah, we've got amazing synergies, you know, why don't we, why don't we go for it. Um, at the time, Axo had had a hostile, um, approach from a company called PPG. So they were juggling a hostile $28 billion approach. And so often when you get a hostile approach and you don't want to— I mean, the word hostile obviously implies that it's, it's a deal you don't really want, or certainly the management team or the board don't really want. Well, then there are tactics to avoid that hostile bid, and one of them can be kind of a defensive move where you separately go and start trying to merge with someone else so that your shareholders can kind of see that that merger direction deal would be more favorable and better than this hostile takeover deal. Because in the end, it's the shareholders that decide. They own the business, right? So Axo had this hostile thing, which kind of pushed them a little bit towards talking with Axalta. Axalta had also had separately a cash bid from Japan's Nippon Paint. And so basically Axalta were trying to, they were slightly different. They were trying to strengthen their bargaining position in the Nippon deal by basically trying to create some competitive tension by saying, look, we've got another potential deal in here with Axo. So they were just trying to maneuver and, you know, gamesmanship in that kind of, that deal with Nippon Paint. So it was quite a multifaceted situation in 2017 where it just, it wasn't just Axo talking to Axalta. There were two others involved from either side. And, and so anyway, what happened in the end was they just couldn't agree terms. Um, I think because Axalta had this cash bid, they were perhaps, you know, wanting a higher valuation than Axo were willing to kind of agree with. And so ultimately there was a valuation gap. And so they walked away.

Alright, well, look, let's, uh, to finish the show, let me just wrap up then everything that you've just said there. So it's a little bit more digestible to take away for any students thinking about the deal mechanics here. So number one, synergies, undoubtedly. So the deal is a clear example of M&A being used as a deliberate tool to lock in that substantial amount of cost synergy there, $600 million circa amount you mentioned. And boost margins towards around the 20% level. So systematically extracting efficiencies that would be otherwise pretty impossible to achieve if you're going about it from an organic perspective. So that's number one synergies. Number two, cross-border. So merging Amsterdam and Philadelphia into a single platform, that does show how cross-border combinations can stitch together plants, in this case labs, You know, you think paint, you kind of just think applying the paint, but no, I mean, there is some facts here. I mean, I did see, you know, our fantastic researcher Saab, he, what was the number here? He had the merged company will operate in 160+ countries, 173 manufacturing sites, 91 R&D facilities. 91 R&D facilities. It's pretty crazy, right?

That's insane.

Um, so yeah, this kind of thing, stitching together plants, labs, distribution across regions, giving the company new global reach. Global reach. Um, the combined entity gives you bargaining power with suppliers, hence the margin movement. Um, and then the ability to serve multinational customers as one integrated supplier. We mentioned earlier, who you're going to call? Goldman Sachs for advisory deals. Who you're going to call for your paint. Well, whether it's consumer-facing, as you said, or it's my, you know, my vehicles, for example, in a more industrial sense, my manufacturing process, I could go to both in one place, and that can work on bigger deals, more efficiency on the customer side as well as supplier side. Number 3, consolidation. Um, you know, when you think about the sector in itself, cost inflation, tough competition, ever-increasing demanding customers. I mean, I think that goes across all sectors. Um, so bringing together, as you said, the ranking of number 3 and number 6 is about buying into cost efficiencies and pricing power and R&D, which is critical within this field as well, in one, in one fell swoop. And then finally, and I quite like this, you mentioned egos. Interesting that they could put egos aside when the money's right, which is, uh, normally the case. But the same deal logic that failed in 2017 now has a better chance of rewarding shareholders because of a key thing. And this is where I think for any young person listening to this, thinking about this from a career perspective, it's not just about the synergies and the financial kind of metrics that define the success or not of this deal. It's also the macro overlay of which at that point in time, where are we? Um, so, you know, it's kind of that kind of cost as well as the capital markets backdrop, and that shifted over the last 8 years or so. And so it's management's job to recognize when conditions have changed, align, and rerun those strategic plays at the right moment in time. So, um, but yeah, they put, put the egos aside for now. So great stuff. Well, as mentioned before, uh, any questions at all, any opinions, anything like that, please do just drop us a comment. Let us know. We'd love to interact with you on Spotify, YouTube, wherever you might be listening. But have a fantastic week ahead and thank you very much, Piers.

Thanks a lot.