NEWSLETTER of January 16, 2026

The following content has been added at finexpert:

KfW Research
NACHFOLGE-MONITORING MITTELSTAND 2025
The latest SME Succession Monitoring report from KfW Research confirms the recent trend toward more closure plans among small and medium-sized enterprises. Deliberate business closures without a succession solution are once again being considered more frequently. One in four companies would like to take this route after the senior generation retires, amounting to around 114,000 per year until the end of 2029. As before, this step is most often considered for reasons of age. Recently, the factor of bureaucracy has also gained relevance. Nevertheless, succession remains high on the agenda: around 109,000 SMEs per year are aiming to establish a succession plan by 2029. The average valuations of the desired purchase prices have increased significantly since 2019, by around +34% for SMEs as a whole. Adjusted for price, the asking prices for SMEs have increased by around 9.5% on average. >more

BCG | DGFP | Restart Career
BENCHMARK-STUDIE RESTRUKTURIERUNGEN 2026
Economic pressure on companies in Germany remains high. In the midst of comprehensive transformation and restructuring processes, many organizations are faced with the challenge of implementing job cuts professionally, fairly, and effectively—often under considerable time and cost pressure and with limited benchmarks. At the same time, restructuring is still rarely discussed openly in practice. To create transparency in this area, the German Association for Human Resource Management (DGFP), the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Restart Career have initiated a benchmark study on the topic of restructuring. The aim of the study is to identify success factors and offer companies concrete guidance for future restructuring projects. The study is based on anonymized data from 254 companies in Germany that were surveyed between September and November 2025. >more

KfW Research
NACHHALTIGKEIT GEWINNT BEI KREDITVERHANDLUNGEN GROßER KMU AN BEDEUTUNG
For small and medium-sized enterprises, requests for sustainability information from banks continued to play a minor role in 2024. The KfW SME Panel shows that, as in the previous year, the topic of sustainability was only addressed by around 15% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that negotiated loans. However, sustainability was discussed more frequently than in 2023 in loan negotiations involving larger SMEs and SMEs in the manufacturing, construction, and trade sectors. Despite planned easing of sustainability reporting requirements for companies, it can be assumed that banks' transparency requirements will at least remain in place and that sustainability aspects will have an even greater influence on corporate lending in the future. It is therefore essential for SMEs to take a close look at their own sustainability profile and to collect sustainability data in a structured manner. >more

Bain & Company
GLOBAL HEALTHCARE PRIVATE EQUITY REPORT 2026
Healthcare private equity reached a record high in global deal value in 2025, powered by large transactions and overcoming a slowdown in the second quarter in both North America and Asia-Pacific. Deal count posted the second-highest annual total on record, with strength across all deal sizes. And provider and biopharma anchored activity while healthcare IT continued to grow its share of healthcare transaction volume. Our report explores the underlying trends in 2025, including rising investor confidence in market fundamentals in the face of headwinds, the importance of operational sophistication, the return of sponsor-to-sponsor activity, and the growing importance of AI and technology. Looking ahead, investors will need conviction in their value-creation playbooks to deliver outsized returns as competition for assets remains intense. >more

CORPORATE ESG PROFILES AND INVESTOR HORIZONS
Laura T. Starks, Parth Venkat, and Qifei Zhu
2025
We find that long-term institutional investors tilt their portfolios towards firms with better ESG profiles, in the cross-sections of both institutional investor portfolios and the ownership of firms. We test whether several theoretically motivated mechanisms can explain this relationship. Our results that long-term investors exhibit patience with firms around poor earnings announcements, but quickly sell portfolio firms after negative ES incidents, support the hypothesis that long term and short term investors evaluate information differently. In addition, our evidence shows that limits-to-arbitrage plays a role as we find investors’ ESG tilting weakens following regulatory shocks that shorten their horizon. >more

THE INTANGIBLES SONG IN TAKEOVER ANNOUNCEMENTS: GOOD TEMPO, HOLLOW TUNE
Zoran M. Filipovic, and Alexander F. Wagner
2025
Mergers and acquisitions are often motivated by the intention of creating value from intangible assets. We develop a word list of intangibles and apply it to takeover announcements. One standard deviation more in intangible-related language (“intangibles talk”) lowers announcement returns for the acquirer by 0.53 percentage points, and predicts worse operating performance. Bidder managers appear to believe in the deals nonetheless, as evidenced by insider trades, payment choices, and completion probabilities and speed. Overall, takeover announcement texts reveal important information regarding hard-to-measure aspects of deal quality. >more