AT A GLANCE

Challenges

  • Limited growth opportunities without expansion

  • Decisions on whether to grow slowly internally or faster through acquisition

  • Identifying the most appropriate growth opportunities

  • Availability of information

Benefits

  • Our understanding of the sectors and our client’s capabilities

  • A consistent approach across each area of opportunity to enable comparison

  • Clarity on information gaps and required next steps

  • Working jointly to bring together commercial and technical expertise

Growth Strategy: energy sector data services provider

 ” Our client has a clear view on where to focus its growth strategy and clarity on an approach to assess potential future opportunities.”

Our client objectives

Our client asked us to work with them to identify growth opportunities that could be pursued through expanding existing services or through acquisitions. This included identifying, and narrowing down, a range of alternative service areas, then identifying and researching potential acquisition targets.

Our approach

We worked with our client to develop a framework on which to map energy sector opportunities, covering both existing activities and a broad range of new services. We jointly determined a set of selection criteria to prioritise the activities and services on which to focus our analysis. We undertook detailed market research to provide a view on the scale of the opportunities in three areas, the main players and their characteristics, potential entry strategies and potential benefits to be gained. For a small number of companies, we undertook further commercial research and analysis to support the Board’s decision-making process.

Outcomes

  • We identified areas of the utilities sectors that might provide growth opportunities for our client and provided them with an indication of the scale of each opportunity

  • Using our selection criteria provided a focus for our more detailed market review

  • We provided commercial overviews of potential target companies.