Corporate Strategy

Sound strategy is the cornerstone of success and a prerequisite for superior results. Creating a successful strategy requires executives first to assess the market accurately and then decide what actions the organization must take to achieve its goals. Thereafter, executives must ensure that their strategies achieve the desired results. Axafina's Strategy service line provides strategic consulting services that help clients consistently outperform their competitors. The following services help top management uncover new sources of value at the corporate and operating levels and then implement them successfully:

Axafina´s Corporate Transformation practice dramatically changes how your business operates, reshaping the business portfolio to:

• Improve operations.
• Unbundle the value chain.
• Refocus the business portfolio.
• Inject appropriate technology.
• Enable your people to perform optimally.
• Create sustainable financial structures.

Axafina can provide a total service to help you transform intelligently in order to outperform the competition, taking both traditional and non-traditional opportunities into account. Our deep operational and execution expertise reduces the risks of transformation and assists you in meeting your business goals.

Exploiting every source of value in your merger or acquisition is no easy task. It requires innovative, comprehensive services supported by proprietary tools, execution-driven playbooks and proven approaches. It requires tight linkage between merger planning and merger integration. It requires a practical, results-driven approach.

To become and remain fast and effective acquirers, companies must make immediate improvements to their merger and acquisition (M&A) processes to keep pace with leading practices. And they must set their sights on achieving a new level of M&A capability—one that goes even beyond the very best that serial acquirers have today.

The best performers in M&A deals today have reinvented their merger integration with four new approaches. These approaches accelerate the time to value by bringing the most valuable activities forward, increasing the likelihood they will lead to superior results.

Axafina sees four ways in which today's leading companies are fast-tracking their most valuable merger integration activities. Leading companies are:

• Jump-starting merger integration activities before the merger closes.
• Addressing corporate culture clash before it begins.
• Prioritizing the merger integration agenda according to the value contributed before conventional task assignments take hold.
• Learning from merger integration insights before deciding what to buy and how much to pay.

Senior executives need an objective basis for taking into account shareholder value when making corporate strategy decisions. An objective basis—one that managers, board members and investors can all agree upon—provides a foundation for the kind of success that the stock market validates over a prolonged period, rather than the short run. Most traditional value-based management approaches focus exclusively on analyzing historical financial ratios.

Axafina's Shareholder Value Analysis practice drives dynamic solutions from tough decisions. Using proprietary shareholder value approaches, tools and analytics we can take you to the next performance tier.

Using proprietary shareholder value approaches, tools and analytics to measure performance, Axafina uncovers new sources of value.

Axafina's superior-results approach to dynamic shareholder value analysis includes:

• Identifying key industry trends and value drivers.
• Analyzing how your company is creating value or falling short.
• Determining company imperatives and opportunities.
• Matching opportunities to key assets/offerings and showing the value impact.
• Pinpointing action steps that the CEO should take.

superior-results management teams use penetrating facts about their business and their markets as a powerful competitive weapon. Axafina can help you get there.

Our commitment to helping you achieve superior results is absolute. Axafina has extensive industry and functional expertise in creating and implementing strategy. Working with clients to understand their business demands, we also help them craft the strategies to drive new growth. We have the systems and methodologies in place to help individual client teams leverage the intellectual capital of the entire Axafina organization.

Axafina has been helping companies transform for superior results over many years. We believe that what is required, first and foremost, is a willingness to consider all the possibilities: to look at ways to radically redesign a business. We can help you ask the right questions and then help you formulate the appropriate strategies to drive transformative change. A well-executed corporate transformation can deliver as much value for a company and its shareholders as a successful merger or acquisition.

Axafina's vast range of experience and capabilities in mergers and acquisitions can be leveraged as a total solution or individual services may be used:

• Pre-Deal M&A Advisory: We develop an integrated, robust acquisition strategy that will serve as your growth platform.
• Transaction Analysis/Strategic Due Diligence: Once a deal is in the works, we conduct a number of analyses to determine the true value of the deal.
• Merger Integration: We work with you to tailor an approach that can be used across integration efforts, at the same time allowing flexibility to address the uniqueness of each transaction.
• Corporate Transformation/Divestitures: We help companies use divestitures to create strategic value for the overall entity.
• Alliances/Joint Ventures: We can help companies focus on six fundamental factors to achieve real value from alliances.
• Shareholder Value Analysis: Axafina's Shareholder Value Analysis uses proprietary assets and frameworks to identify hidden sources of value at the operational level so executives can make the tough decisions.