Headquarters
Stuttgart, Germany

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Employees
>299,000

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Annual Revenue
~€167 Billion

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Annual Production
~3.4 Million Vehicles

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Daimler serves as the parent company to leading brands including Mercedes Benz Cars & Trucks, Mercedes-Maybach, Mercedes- AMG and smart, and provides a range of financial services such as vehicle financing, leasing, fleet management and insurance.

• High velocity of deals – evaluating in excess of 1,000 targets per year with over 100 M&A and corporate development projects ongoing at any one time;
• Many cross-border deals in high-growth markets and deal teams spread across the globe;
• A growing number of non-core M&A projects, including corporate ventures, partnerships, alliances and joint ventures

Today, the automotive industry is on the verge of a major transformation. We believe that four future-oriented fields will fundamentally change the nature of mobility; CASE stands for Connectivity, Autonomous Driving, Mobility Service, and Electric Mobility. As an organization, we have embraced these four fields and M&A in these areas is core to our strategy to grow and remain competitive.

In addition to traditional product areas like cars, vans, buses, and trucks, our M&A team focuses on automotive-related services, new mobility solutions and other services across a broad portfolio. In addition to core M&A, we are looking at an increasing number of partnerships, alliances and joint ventures.

We have operations in 23 countries and serve 49 markets across six continents, so many of our M&A and corporate development projects are cross-border and complex in nature. It is therefore crucial that we can take a smart approach to M&A project management. For us, culture is at the heart of deal success – this starts with effective communication and collaborative working practices across all teams. It’s also crucial to have the right processes in place – for instance, given our high deal volume, we see great benefit in taking a systematic approach to M&A across the deal lifecycle and learning from past deals. We also ensure all M&A and related projects align with the core strategic priorities of the wider organization.

In the past, we used a standard database to store our M&A project information. We also used separate SharePoint environments and relied heavily on email communication across different servers. A lot of our project information was spread out across different systems and teams – making it difficult to piece together. For such a large organization, with deal teams spread across the world, we were looking for a dedicated end-to-end M&A solution to replace this fragmented way of working.

Digital M&A makes sense for our organization

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With an M&A Platform, we have been able to increase collaboration (including with external partners such as legal, tech and investment transaction advisors), transparency and the speed at which we evaluate and close deals, while benefitting from having all project information in one place. The ability to have multiple fully customizable pipelines allows us to run a large variety of processes in one tool.

Midaxo’s purpose-built M&A software delivered:

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Faster Analysis and Decision Making – Having transitioned away from the old-style of working, all teams can now work in real-time and are no longer slowed down by the information bottlenecks we experienced with our old systems and working practices. The Midaxo Insights tool in the platform automates much of the time-consuming work of gathering basic information on potential targets in the initial analysis phase.

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More Transparency – We use a central dashboard in the platform to monitor the pipeline/phase of all our projects and provide different views for the Heads of M&A and other departments in different regions. With Midaxo, we can track progress across deal origination, due diligence and integration, and promote transparency across our increasing number of projects.

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Incorporating Best Practices into a Set of Repeatable Processes – The platform allows us to store, improve, and execute on 20+ specific playbooks that we have developed for different situations (e.g. joint ventures in China). With Midaxo, we have been able to incorporate lessons learned into playbooks for even further improvement. New colleagues benefit from our past experiences and have a clear structured plan to move ahead based on the respective playbook template.

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Midaxo’s M&A Solution has helped us do this by systematizing our work with accelerated efficiency and transparency, and by building playbooks to capture learnings and best practices. This way of working is and will continue to be central to our future M&A success. In this way, smart M&A is helping to position the Daimler Group for a bright future and supporting the company’s capacity for innovation.