You are evaluating a potential acquisition of a mid-sized payments software company and your CFO asks you to anchor valuation using precedent transactions rather than a pure trading comps view. You have six recent announced deals in adjacent vertical software and payments infrastructure, along with the target's latest LTM financials. The buyer would likely pay a control premium, but you need to separate market-clearing precedent value from buyer-specific synergies. Assume all figures are in USD and use enterprise value based on announced deal terms.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Target LTM revenue | $420,000,000 |
| Target LTM EBITDA | $84,000,000 |
| Target net debt | $110,000,000 |
| Median precedent EV / Revenue | 4.8x |
| Median precedent EV / EBITDA | 15.5x |
| Buyer annual cost synergies | $18,000,000 |
| Synergy realization multiple | 8.0x |
Walk me through how you would run a precedent transactions analysis on this target, what valuation range you would derive from the transaction set, and how you would distinguish standalone value from the maximum price this buyer could justify paying.