Premium evaluation in mergers and acquisitions of electric power companies with due regard to political factors

The subject of this article is the mechanism of premium evaluation in mergers and acquisitions deals, the research topic is the impact of country and industry factors on the premium. The purpose of the article is to build a model for assessing the relative premium in mergers and acquisitions of electric power companies. The research methodology is based on a comparative business valuation method. The empirical base of the study includes data on 6826 mergers and acquisitions that occurred around the world from 1997 to 2019. The research base includes data on both public and non-public companies, for which the amount paid and the value of total assets are known. The article proposes an author's approach to grouping industries based on the equality of premium coefficients in regression, and the groups of industries with equal premium are obtained. It is shown that the grouping of industries obtained by the mathematical algorithm almost completely corresponds to the branch structure of the electric power industry. It is also specified that the political factors formalized with the FSI (Fragile State Index) influence the creation of premiums in mergers and acquisitions. The coefficient of determination of the final econometric models reaches 15.6 percent, which can be estimated as a high quality of assessment, provided the relative premium in a dealis predicted, but not the amount paid, which is closely correlated with the value of the company's assets. The practical significance of the study is in the possibility of predicting business value in mergers and acquisitions, as well as establishing the amount paid in a deal, in cases where such information is not available.