How do analysts draft CIMs

I'm an incoming IB intern in London and my allocated 'buddy' has given me an example of a CIM they did for a sell-side M&A in order for me to familiarise myself with it.

Holy hell does it look like torture to draft? The CIM ppt is over 100 slides of text and charts covering detailed info about the market / addressable market size and growth prospectus and all these in depth sections about sub-sectors of the market and then about the company and loads of other stuff. It looks like the biggest pain to find all that information.

How do analysts/associates go about drafting these? Where does all the information come from, do analysts literally need to spend their nights and weekends looking for research reports and doing DD themselves to gather the info on things like the industry/market outlook to include and everything else or does the company provide all the information and the analysts/associates just turn it into a powerpoint to look pretty?

I understand from google in the US they do things quite differently than the U.K. I.e the US tend to do it in a vertical / word format similar to a prospectus style whereas in London it's typically done as a PowerPoint.

Thanks all.

4 Comments
 

In my experience, you rarely create ‘own’ content or conduct in-depth research for a CIM.

For example, in most plain-vanilla sell-side processes you have VDD advisors who create VDD reports (e.g. financial, commercial, sometimes environmental or ops etc.). So these reports are often used as source for IMs (e.g. for market section, financial section)

Bankers often times also request information directly from the company or use internal company presentations. It really depends on the process though. Sometimes you also have ‘drafting sessions’ with the client if the products/services/industry is particularly complex.

And totally agree with the above comment. It gets super painful when Ds, VPs etc start to overengineer every slide or suddenly change the ‘flow’ of the entire document..

 
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