The Deal, TheStreet's (TST) institutional business, announced the winners of the sixth annual Most Admired Corporate Dealmaker (MACD) Awards, which recognize the best corporate dealmaking teams at acquisitive, large-cap U.S. companies in ten industry groups. Each year, winners are selected from major S&P industry groups and through a survey of The Deal's audience. Voters determine which candidate in each industry excelled in overall M&A strategy based on the criteria of strategy, choice of targets, deal execution and team skill.
"We understand the difficulty in dealmaking in good as well as tough times, so the Most Admired Corporate Dealmaker Awards were created to celebrate excellence in deals no matter the financial environment," said Jeffrey Kanige, Editor in Chief of The Deal. "We're thrilled to announce this year's winners and look forward to recognizing their achievements at the New York Stock Exchange next month."
The following companies were recognized and honored as winners:
Consumer Discretionary: Amazon.com Inc. for the technological innovation that drives its growth including purchase of app maker Evi Technologies, an electronic ink company from Samsung, streaming music service Songza and book recommendation site GoodReads.
Consumer Staples: The Coca-Cola Co. for investments that span the globe with one of its units buying a stake in Foster's brewery operations in Fiji and Samoa, and the company increasing its stake in a British smoothie company Innocent Drinks.
Energy: Kinder Morgan for positioning itself to capitalize on the resurgence of domestic energy production. The pipeline giant has invested approximately $22-billion to grow through joint ventures, expansions and acquisitions.
Finance: Berkshire Hathaway Inc. for finding value in a range of industries including media, manufacturing, financial services, energy and food.
Healthcare: Abbott Laboratories for working to deepen and broaden product lines with the $310-million purchase of stent maker IDEV Technologies.
Industrials: United Technologies Corp. for building its business through decades of acquisition with net sales of nearly $58-billion, helped by the $16.5-billion acquisition of Goodrich Corporation last year. Its acquisitive nature has paid off for investors, by building its separate business units into world-leading companies that deliver double-digit operating profit margins.
Information Technology: IBM Corp. for making tuck-in acquisitions that fine-tune its suite of product offerings. Those deals included a $2-billion purchase of cloud infrastructure company SoftLayer and several smaller deals.
