In this opening session of the AM&AA Winter Conference 2016, Diane Niederman, VP of Alliances, outlines the association’s growing international focus, noting that roughly 10% of its 1,000 members now come from outside the United States. She invites existing and prospective members to deepen involvement in cross‑border M&A activities. Sri Gidapalli then explains the day’s format: three regional roundtables (Asia, Europe, Americas) that will discuss macro‑economic trends, policy and cultural impacts on dealmaking, recent transactions, and how the AM&AA international network can add value. Gidapalli also shares drafts of regional white papers (India, Brazil, Mexico, with China, Australia, and Europe in progress) intended to become a future publication on cross‑border dealmaking. The segment concludes with introductions of the roundtable moderators—Mike Daigle (Americas), Don Kaiser (Europe), and Caroline Berube (Asia)—and brief descriptions of their professional backgrounds and focus areas.
Chapters
We're very, very excited to have you here today. My name is Diane Niederman. I'm the VP of Alliances for the AM&AA, and I just wanted to give you a quick overview, an important one though, on what we are doing on the international front, and then I will introduce you to Shree, who is going to be leading you all today. The cross-border, when I first started at the Alliance, was something that, oh, other people do that. Now everybody does that. It's almost impossible to do any kind of deal nowadays without working with other countries and people of other cultures. And so what has happened is that international has become a huge part of our initiative to grow. And we have brought in many, many people from different countries, through our certification program. They've come from all over. They've come from Dubai, they've come from Germany, they've come from Italy, and now we have about 10% of our 1,000 members are part of the international community, and our goal is to grow that and also to create more and more ways for our international and cross-border members who are from other countries and who are from the US doing deals together, and we, we want to really grow this. So one of the big purposes of today is to continue that discussion. And I also— anyone who is a member of the AM&AA already and is interested in becoming more deeply involved in our international strategic initiative, please let myself know or our new director of member services, David Ballou, who is somewhere. There is David. And if you are not a member and are interested in becoming more involved in this initiative, also talk to either one of us and we'll be happy to help you. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce you to Sri Gidapalli of Seminar, who is going to be running this session for us today. Thank you so much.
Good morning, everyone. Wow, this light is really bright. So yeah, glad you all could join us. I know we are competing against the Deal Bash next door. But we'll try to do the best we can. And as Michael or I think Diane said, we'll still have enough time to go attend the Deal Bash because I'll be going over there too. So as Diane said, the international, you know, the member community within AMA has been growing steadily. And we did pretty well with our roundtables over the last couple couple of years. We had cross-border M&A panels and we kind of been blending it with roundtables. So the idea is we'll just, you know, for now, for this current event, we're just going to have 3 roundtables. One with the dealmakers from Asia or folks focused on Asia, one with focus on Europe and the other one with the Americas, both North and South America. And I have a list of questions prepared for the roundtable members to just go through them, share their perspectives. It's all free-flowing, just have to share your perspectives. They start with something, you know, a little more in the macro level, just what do you see in the global economy, what do you see in your regions, Are there policies, cultural issues, how they're affecting dealmaking? And then it kind of navigates towards more, you know, questions related to those dealmakers, you know, what kind of deals have they been working on? How is the AMA International, you know, the member network helping them? What are the suggestions to improve the interaction? So all that information, you know, once we have that across different roundtables, it's my job to kind of aggregate all that information and hopefully share the feedback with the rest of the AMA members in a newsletter perhaps in the coming weeks. I also wanted to let you know about something, you know, some of the volunteers within the International Committee have worked on over the last several months. We've— these are the drafts of the white papers we put together. We wanted to, you know, have white papers for different regions. For now, we have 3 of them in a draft format. We'll be happy to share with you, take a look. These are by no means complete, they're just drafts. But we have one on India, one on Brazil, and one on Mexico. I know the one on China is in the works, Australia is in the works, European white paper is in the works. So the idea is, you know, AMA for all the deal-making we do here, it's also something to do along the, you know, body of knowledge. So this will all be compiled into, you know, maybe a publication one day. About cross-border dealmaking. Sure. So with that, now let me give the mic to Michael and Caroline. Michael is going to help out with the European table.
Sure.
I'm Mike Daigle. I'm a partner with Chainco, a law firm in Chicago. We're in the franchise segment, but we do a lot of M&A work within that segment representing franchisors who are selling or buying companies and also representing private equity who are investing in the franchise segment. I'm going to be taking care of the— and moderating the roundtable on the Americas, and it's all about nuggets, guys, so think of your nuggets.
Thank you.
Hi, I am Caroline Berube. I'm based in China. I've been in Asia for 20 years, and we do represent clients who are private equity firm company who are like doing either acquisition or selling their companies and who have subsidiaries in Asia. So I hope you'll join our roundtable.
Sorry, I forgot to mention Don. Actually, Michael is going to moderate the Americas table and I'm just going to go around the different tables. Don does a lot of deals with European companies and countries. So, Don, you want to—
Sure.
Thank you. Good morning. My name is Don Kaiser. My firm is Hanover Limited in Minneapolis. And we work with small to medium-sized technology firms in the U.S. going to the EU market and EU firms coming into the U.S. market. Focusing on technologies like life science, energy, and general manufacturing, and we're investment bankers. So I look forward to talking with you about Europe. Thank you.
