[MUSIC] Theory and practice of M&A uses knowledge from several fields of business, including strategy management law and accounting. So that's what we call the business of M &A, what this course is going to focus on is finance. So we're going to talk about the finance of mergers and acquisitions is going to of course is going to be focused specifically on finance, okay? So this first MOOC is called valuing and pricing and M&A deal. And what we're going to focus on on this MOOC is mostly valuation, right? And if you think about the typical M&A deal, what happens is the acquire is buying all the shares of the target. So it's very important to think about whether the acquire is getting a fair deal, right? And in order to answer that question, we have to answer another question which is, what should the target stock price be? What's a fair value for the target stock price? So valuation is an extremely important part of M&A analysis. The finance of M&A starts with valuation, okay? And valuing the target is important, but valuing the acquire is also essential because in some M&A deals as we're going to learn in this course, target shareholders are paid by getting shares of the acquire. And now we can reverse the question, right? Our target shareholders getting a fair deal. What is the fair value of the acquire? So when you design an M&A deal, the analyst has to figure out what the fair value is both for the target and the acquire. So valuation is an essential part of M&A, and it doesn't stop there. There is also synergy evaluation, right? Because M&A deals only makes sense if there is value creation, we have to figure out the new value, the value of synergies as we like to call it, okay? And the question we have to answer is what do we mean by value creation in M&A? How do we figure out the value that is created by M&A deal? So that's another aspects of valuation that we're going to learn in this course. We're going to learn how to estimate the value created by an M&A deal, okay? And then what we're going to do is, valuing and pricing, right? What you're going to learn is that you can use this valuation tools to understand what determines the price that is paid for the targeting and M&A deal. So the price for the target is going to be related to the valuation of the target, the value of synergies. And we're going to use this analysis to determine the net present value of the deal for both the acquired and the target. And as you probably learned already in another finance course, net present value is the key concept of any type of financial analysis. So what we're going to learn in this course is to do NPV analysis, net present value analysis for M&A deals, okay? The course is divided in four modules. In module one, we're actually going to start with an overview. We're not going to start directly with valuation. I want to give you an overview of M&A topics, terminology and also talk about the empirical evidence that we have on the history of M&A, right? So what are the drivers of M&A deals? What is the evidence we have on value games? So I want to update to to give you this this evidence and to do this overview of of the world of M&A before we go into valuation, which is what we're going to dig into in module two. In module two we're going to to learn different tools that we have to determine the fair value of a company, right? So that's what we call company evaluation. Then in module three we're going to use this valuation analysis specifically for M&A. So we're going to learn what is the role of targeting acquire valuation in M&A, why evaluation is important and how we use it to design an M&A deal. Finally, in module four, we're going to move to synergies, right? The new value, the value that is created by an M&A deal, the value of the synergies. We're going to learning module four how to place a value on synergies. And then we're also going to talk in module four we're also going to cover a very interesting topic which is the the market for hostile takeovers. We're going to learn the difference between friendly and hostile takeovers and we're going to learn how to identify and how to model hostile takeovers in addition to friendly deals. Each module has several practice quiz questions with solutions. So you have an opportunity to make sure you understood the content that you just learned. Some questions are qualitative, other questions are quantitative. And then as usual we're going to have an end of module quiz where you're going to take a quiz to make sure that you learn enough in order to move on in the course in order to pass the course. Finally you're going to have the opportunity to work on an onerous assignment if you choose to take the honors degree. There is an onerous assignment available which essentially consists of a real world valuation. I'm going to give you data that you can use to estimate the fair value of a real world company which is an excellent way to illustrate the new knowledge that you're learning in this course. Why M&N anyway? Right, I mean you might be asking at this point why should I take this course and what I like to say is that this course will help any student that that wants to increase their ability to understand and execute deals. Including but not limited to entrepreneurs, consultants, bankers, investors, analysts, corporate managers, marketers, strategies and deal makers of all types. In addition, this is very important actually, even if you're not planning to directly work with the M&A. Studying M&A is a very good way to apply the theories and models that you learn in other finance course. Practical real world examples of M&A deals allow you to learn more to practice what you learned about financial modeling and capital structure theory, which is a very important topic in corporate finance. And my view is M&A is actually the best way to illustrate the importance of finance theories in the real world. So even if you're not planning to directly work with M&A, I think this course will be very beneficial for you
