Thermal Management M&A Advisory — Sell-side, Buy-side & Integration

M&A is not the right answer to every growth question. Sometimes a partnership delivers more, faster. Sometimes the operational case for buying a competitor falls apart on integration. Sometimes a sale is the right outcome but the timing is wrong. We say so when we think so. Where M&A is the right vehicle, we work as one part of a small team. The other parts — legal, process, financial due diligence — are handled by partners we know well.

Our role

What we do

Our role is concentrated on the parts where sector knowledge is decisive:

Sector intelligence and target identification — knowing which companies are quietly available, which are not, and which are about to be. This knowledge is built from years of operating in the sector and from relationships that predate any formal process.
Buyer universe mapping — knowing who is buying, what they are looking for, and who returns the call.
Door opening — making the first contact in a way the recipient takes seriously, because the introduction comes from someone they already know.
Strategic fit and synergy thesis — assessing whether a target makes sense and what it would actually deliver.
Negotiation sparring on operational and sector terms.
Post-merger integration — leadership and culture depth to realise the value the deal promised, not just the processes it required.

What we take on

The mandates we take

S

Sell-side advisory for owner-managed and family-owned companies — typically €30–200M enterprise value, where sector knowledge of the buyer universe is the bottleneck. We know who buys in this segment, what they pay, and what they need to see before they move.

B

Buy-side advisory for strategic acquirers and PE firms with industrials mandates. Most of the compelling thermal management assets in the €10–150M range are not on any process list and are not being actively marketed. Finding them requires years of sector presence and direct relationships.

A

Asset and carve-out advisory — production lines, technology assets, and sub-segments of larger groups, increasingly frequent as Tier-1s reshape their xEV and thermal portfolios. This work requires sector depth that generalist advisors cannot acquire quickly. Knowing which divisions are under restructuring pressure, which assets have been quietly assessed for sale, and which buyers have the appetite and the technical understanding to close: that intelligence comes from sustained sector presence.

Process & legal

Handled by Nexia One Corporate Finance

Nexia One Corporate Finance is our long-standing M&A process partner. Headquartered in Prague and active across Central and Eastern Europe (CZ, SK, Poland, Hungary), Nexia One has completed over 170 transactions since 2003 and was ranked among the top three corporate finance advisors in the Czech Republic by transaction count in 2022. The senior team brings transaction experience exceeding €7 billion.

In our M&A mandates, Nexia One handles the parts we deliberately do not run ourselves:

Legal due diligence and share purchase agreement drafting.
Financial due diligence coordination, working with the relevant audit and tax firms.
Data room set-up and process management.
Compliance and regulatory filings.

As a member of the Nexia International network — the eighth-largest global advisory group, with member firms in 125 countries — Nexia One brings cross-border reach where mandates cross jurisdictions. Together — one team, end-to-end.

Nexia One Corporate Finance — nexiaonecf.cz

Prague · Active across CZ, SK, Poland, Hungary · 170+ transactions since 2003 · Member of Nexia International (125 countries)

Engineering & integration

Technical due diligence and post-merger integration

Engineering due diligence — SATTELO

Where a target company’s value lies in its engineering capability, manufacturing processes, or technology assets, technical due diligence requires people who have built the same systems — not just assessed them. SATTELO, our sister company, leads this work. Their 42 engineers — with over 220 thermal management projects completed across nine countries — assess product architecture, BoM structure, manufacturing maturity, and supplier qualification. The result is an engineering view that sits alongside the financial and legal findings, not downstream of them.

A financial model shows what the revenue is. Only engineers who have designed the same thermal architecture can assess whether the technology underlying it is defensible.

SATTELO s.r.o. — sattelo.com

Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic · Sister company of MDSG · 42 specialists, 11 nationalities · 220+ projects since 2015 · Thermal management, heat pumps, battery cooling, HVAC engineering

Post-merger integration — MDSG

Deals close. Integrations often do not deliver what the model promised — and the reason is rarely the numbers.

A large corporate acquires an innovative engineering company. The acquisition thesis is clear: technology, talent, and a culture of fast decision-making that the acquirer cannot replicate internally. Within eighteen months, procurement approval cycles have quadrupled, three of the five key engineers have left, the IT migration has consumed management’s attention for twelve months, and the product development pipeline has stalled. The innovation that justified the acquisition price is no longer visible. What happened is not unusual. A larger organisation imposed its own processes, rhythms, and reporting structures on a smaller one — and in doing so, dismantled precisely the things it had paid for.

Integration is primarily a leadership and culture question, not a process or IT question. Process alignment can be project-managed. Talent loss and cultural erosion are much harder to reverse — and by the time they appear in the performance numbers, the damage is already done. MDSG’s role in post-merger integration focuses on three areas: aligning leadership between acquiring and acquired organisations in a way that preserves trust and operating effectiveness; identifying and protecting the cultural elements of the target that generate the value the deal was built around; and translating the deal logic into a grounded 100-day plan that the combined organisation can actually execute — not the one that looks best in a board presentation.

When growth requires a transaction.