Company: STAA
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form Type: DFAN14A
Source: 0001213900-25-097833
Chunk: 8

Company: STAAR SURGICAL CO
Filing Date: 2025-10-09
Form: DFAN14A
Chunk 8
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 so everyone can see the case they
make for the deal. Even their meetings with the buyer aren’t entirely private: The merger proxy statement will contain a lot of
disclosure about how the deal was negotiated, including the back-and-forth over price and a summary of any financial projections the managers
shared with the buyer. Everyone can see what everyone else saw; there is only so much the managers can do to shade each side’s valuation.

In particular, the target company’s managers
will hire an investment bank to help sell the company. The bank will get the company’s projections and use them to build valuation
models and materials for potential buyers, and to negotiate the price with the buyer. Then, when the deal is negotiated, the bank will
produce a fairness opinion for the target’s board of directors, saying that the deal is financially fair to the shareholders. The
fairness opinion will contain a set of valuations of the company — “public trading multiples imply a price of $27 to $38 per
share, precedent transactions imply $31 to $55, a discounted cash flow model implies $37 to $51,” that sort of thing — and
(hopefully) the actual merger price will be somewhere within the range of at least some of the valuations. Then the board will say “seems
fair” and approve the deal, and then fairness opinion will be included in the merger proxy for the shareholders to vote on the deal.

The shareholders won’t get the bank’s
entire model, but the disclosure will give them at least some sense of the inputs that the bank used. Those inputs will include management’s
financial projections, which the buyers will also get, and both the buyer and the target’s bank will use management’s projections
in valuing the company. Both the buyer and the bank might take the projections with a grain of salt, and they might discount them differently,
but in theory you’d sort of expect the buyer and the seller to be starting from the same set of numbers.

In August, the board of directors of STAAR Surgical
Co. agreed to sell the company to Alcon Research LLC for $28 per share in cash, for a total equity value of about $1.5 billion. That price
represented about a 51% premium to STAAR’s market price when the deal was signed, though the stock had been trading over $30 per
share last November. Even in the deal announcement, STAAR’s management was careful to be like “you should be