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Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque Geneva:

The consensus on shareholder activism in 2013 and 2014 has been that it would increase a great deal, and that it would spread from the US to Europe and other regions. A French asset manager confirms the veracity of this forecast.

Anne-Sophie d’Andlau is the co-founder of CIAM, a Paris-based asset manager specialized in event-driven strategies, with a focus on hard catalysts, corporate events, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as well as activism in European continental companies.

CIAM's original fund strategy was pure merger arbitrage. "From September 2010 to the spring of 2011, everything was perfect," she tells Matthias Knab during a recent Opalesque TV interview. "Lots of M&A around. But then came the Euro crisis and M&A really slowed down, the quality of the transaction deteriorated, not so many counter-offers and lots of failed transactions." So in 2013, CIAM widened their mandate to include a focus on pre-merger, post-merger and activism. The name of the fund was changed to Merger Opportunities, and performance since then has been in the double-digits territory.

"Activism is just starting in Europe," she notes. "It is true that there has been a few initiatives in the past, but nothing compared to what is going on in the US. That is what mak......................

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