BDO adds M&A advisor Martin Linhart to its Deals partnership in Sydney
Seasoned M&A adviser Martin Linhart has kicked off the new year as a partner at BDO, after having most recently focused on establishing his own Sydney-based boutique Make Consulting.
Linhart brings over 17 years of professional experience to BDO’s deals advisory team out of Sydney, including more than a decade spent between PwC and Deloitte in Australia, the US, and his native Germany.
In 2022, he departed Deloitte to establish mid-market M&A consultancy make!, which now looks to have pivoted to providing emotional guidance and counselling for M&A professionals, founders, and impacted employees.
Early in his career, Linhart spent five years in a business development role with Porsche upon completing an engineering degree with TU Kaiserslautern in southwest Germany, before then moving into consulting with PwC’s M&A team in Munich. After a further five years he crossed to Deloitte in Frankfurt, ultimately migrating to Australia with the Big Four firm in 2019.
During his time as a director at Deloitte in Sydney, Linhart focused on areas such as divestment strategy and execution, commercial and operational due diligence, post-merger optimisation, and project management, a skill-set he now brings to BDO. Altogether, he is credited with having successfully delivered more than 70 projects across 38 countries on every continent.
Among those projects is one of the largest ever deals in Australia’s history – BHP’s oil & gas divestment and merger with Woodside, for which Linhart led work focused on carve-out and integration planning. He has also amassed experience in the logistics & transportation, consumer goods, construction, pharmaceuticals and automotive sectors among many others.
Most recently, he co-led commercial due diligence for BDO’s engagement by Japanese special-purpose vehicles company Kyokuto Kaihatsu Kogyo on its acquisition of Melbourne-based truck manufacturer STG Global, a deal which closed in December for $100 million. BDO also provided financial and tax due diligence, respectively led by partners Daniel Coote and Pulin Desai.
In an interview last year to celebrate make!’s first anniversary, Linhart noted the gap in Australia’s M&A middle market, with the biggest local firms concentrating foremost on long-running projects for super-sized clients. BDO’s Australian M&A team meanwhile supports transactions with a typical value of between $20 million and $250 million.
