Gillian Tan, Columnist

The Garbage Deal That Was Anything But

Waste Connections' acquisition of Progressive Waste has even exceeded management's expectations.

April 28, 2017 at 6:35 PM UTC

Gillian Tan is a senior reporter covering finance and alternative asset classes including real estate, infrastructure, private equity, private credit, venture capital and sports business. She previously wrote an opinion column for Bloomberg and was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She is a qualified chartered accountant.

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CEOs and the bankers who advise them like to talk up the benefits of the deals they do, touting the synergies and earnings accretion they expect to achieve to justify spending on transactions. But those benefits don't always pan out, as evidenced by the takeover-related writedowns at companies from Toshiba Corp. to Priceline Group Inc.

That's why it's all the more rare to hear a CEO boast to investors that his company actually "underestimated the opportunity for improvement" at a target. Waste Connections Inc.'s Ronald J. Mittelstaedt, who spent roughly $8 billion in a deal for rival trash processor Progressive Waste Solutions Ltd., is one of the lucky ones.