Our partners Dragomir Stefanov and Pavel Hristov spoke with CEE Legal Matters on the current state of M&A activity and their expectations.

Overall the deal market has been fairly hot in the recent months, including Bulgarian aspects of mega-, trans-Atlantic deals, regional and cross-border transactions. Unsurprisingly, the tech sector was particularly active. Some of the deals worth mentioning are: BC Partners/Kin and Carta, Accenture/Gemseek, Virtusa/Bright. The regional PE fund manager Invenio invested in Software Group.

In terms of inbound acquisitions our view is that

Bulgaria has been increasingly recognized as a home of target businesses that are (globally) scalable, with high-growth potential. This is due to a mixture of beneficial local circumstances and characteristics that position it in a favorable light. To name just a few: a proactive generation of serial entrepreneurs who have created, developed, and sold successful businesses and currently reinvest their earnings into subsequent projects (in the same or often completely different industries and markets) and a mature ecosystem including start-ups, investors (individual angels and sophisticated venture capital and private equity funds), advisers (many law firms play active roles in business and industry associations), highly educated and professionally accomplished diaspora of Bulgarian experts, managers, C-level executives, and businessmen/women from developed markets. As a result, the interest in the market and the dealmaking in 2024 will increase. Local sellers should, however, be more realistic with their valuation expectations because buyers lately are not determined to close a deal at any cost simply due to a fear of missing out.