When Informa offered £502m ($830m) for Datamonitor two years ago, some of the target’s shareholders grumbled at the price. The 650p a share bid represented a premium of just 2 per cent to the previous close – a meagre incentive in a bull market.
Mike Danson (above), the group’s founder and then chief executive, recalls an anxious morning in July 2007 waiting to hear whether the deal would get sufficient investor backing: “We just literally squeezed over ... some of the big institutions didn’t vote for it.”
