M&A Radar (CADE): technical and audit documentation

1. Objective and scope

Monitor merger filings submitted to CADE, enrich them with public registration data from Brazil's Federal Revenue Service and organise M&A activity by date, deal structure, parties, economic groups, sectors and procedural stage. Every category reported to CADE remains in the panel, with no hierarchy or exclusion.

Outputs: analytical spreadsheet, intelligence and quality base, offline HTML panel and public monthly bulletins in HTML, PDF, CSV and JSON.

• Out of scope: transactions below the mandatory filing thresholds, which are not submitted to CADE and therefore do not exist as merger filings. Small roll-ups do not appear; that is the legal scope of the source, not a flaw in the tool.
• Out of scope: any restricted, confidential or sealed-version data.

2. Legal basis and compliance

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Core principle: no inference replaces missing data without explicit labelling. Unavailable fields appear as “, ” or carry a proxy/inference label.

3. Data sources and provenance

• SEI/CADE public search of merger filings: query by case type (ordinary and summary), filed status and date window, capped at one request per second.
• Anchor document: the merger filing receipt, containing applicants with registration number and name, the filing hypothesis/nature and the transaction summary.
• Every downloaded document is preserved as raw, auditable evidence of the extraction.
• Federal Revenue public company data: official monthly dump with companies, establishments, shareholder records and lookup tables for economic activity, municipality, country and legal nature.
• The Revenue base is a monthly snapshot: companies and shareholders registered after the snapshot do not appear, which is why it is reloaded monthly.

4. CADE concepts applied

Filing thresholds (article 88 and Interministerial Ordinance 994/2012): filing is mandatory only when, cumulatively, one economic group had revenue of at least BRL 750 million and another of at least BRL 75 million in Brazil in the previous year. These thresholds explain most mandatory filings, but CADE may still require filings outside them. The radar does not presume financial materiality nor substitute for deal value.

• Transaction structure: the legal or deal form identified in the documents, such as acquisition, asset acquisition, absorption, merger, joint venture or associative contract.
• Category reported to CADE: the description of the competitive relationship available in the source, such as horizontal, vertical, agent substitution, joint venture, absence of nexus or others. “Horizontal” and “vertical” are not transaction structures.
• Procedure: summary and ordinary are review procedures. The radar records the procedure but does not treat it as a measure of deal importance.
• Relevant market: CADE defines it case by case. In the tool, the economic-activity sector is a proxy for the product market and the state is a proxy for the geographic dimension; neither is the formal relevant market.

5. Architecture and pipeline

• SEI search, case-tree navigation and resumable document download.
• Structured parsing of the filing receipt: parties, role, nature and legal form.
• Company registration number extraction and validation, including check-digit verification.
• Loading of the Revenue dump and matching to registration data, with deterministic name-based fallback.
• Mapping of economic activity codes to sectors and resolution of economic groups from shareholder records.
• Cumulative reprocessing: each run adds to the history and downloaded documents are preserved, so running a new window never erases previous periods.
• Generation of the offline HTML panel, intelligence signals and quality metrics.

6. Field-by-field classification methodology

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Holding reclassification rule: holdings and funds do not reveal the operating sector. Two conservative and always-labelled corrections: inference by name, when the corporate name indicates the activity, and inference by relationship, when the buyer is a holding and the transaction is horizontal or vertical, inheriting the sector from the other side.

In some transactions, the available sub-sector reflects the company's corporate nature, such as “holding of non-financial institutions” or “other holding companies”. These classifications indicate that the company operates as an investment vehicle, but do not necessarily identify the activity of the controlled assets. In such cases, the transaction remains in the sector total, but must not be used to claim that a specific link in the chain grew or shrank.

Golden sector rule: each case is treated as one transaction and allocated by its initial filing date; when that date is unavailable, the date of the first document found is used. The single deal sector aims primarily to reflect the activity of the target company or of the transacted assets, combining official CADE data with evidence from the case documents and Federal Revenue registry information. If the acquired side cannot be classified, the buyer's sector is used, followed by another identified party as the final fallback. A filing is never counted in two sectors, and an automated check guarantees the sector totals never exceed the number of filings.

The panel offers three sector-reading perspectives, target or transaction object sector, buyer sector and deal sector, and opens by default on the target or object perspective, the primary lens for M&A activity. Chart bars, labels and rows act as click filters, and the active selection can be exported to Excel.

7. Integrity rules

• One filing equals one deal: counting is always by unique case, never by party and never summed across sectors.
• All categories remain in the universe; the buyer is defined by the recorded role.
• State and registered capital enter the figures only with high confidence, that is, matched by registration number.
• There is never automatic fuzzy matching: ambiguity goes to manual review, not to guesswork.
• Economic groups are not presumed: shared control is flagged as ambiguous, not merged.
• Deal value is never invented; only a declared proxy is used.
• Every inference is labelled so it is not mistaken for primary data.

8. Traceability and quality controls

• Each row carries its source document, allowing any classification to be reopened and checked against the official notice.
• The matching method is recorded (direct registration number, no number, not found).
• Metadata history per case is preserved.
• Check-digit validation of registration numbers eliminates false positives.
• Encoding and accent normalisation prevents tokenisation errors in Portuguese names.
• Automated verification of the golden rule, with coverage reported in the indicators.

9. Declared limitations and biases

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10. Reproducibility, security and privacy

• Every result is regenerable from the public sources and the code, with cumulative and resumable historical backfill.
• Determinism: given the same Revenue snapshot and the same downloaded documents, reconstruction reproduces exactly the same spreadsheet and panel.
• The panel is offline and self-contained: embedded data, no external calls, no cookies and no local storage.
• No sensitive personal data is displayed; personal identifiers are masked at the source and serve only the corporate-control logic.
• No credentials are required for the sources, which are entirely public.

10.1 Structured data for systems and AI

The M&A Radar (CADE) provides structured files for integration with systems, artificial intelligence agents and automated processes. These files complement the panel, the bulletin and the public deals base.

• Bulletin JSON: structured version of the indicators, transactions, sectors, deal types and comparisons of the monthly edition.
• Manifest JSON: technical record of the edition, containing version, publication date, file names, sizes and hashes for integrity verification.

These files are intended for technical consumption. For reading, spreadsheet analysis or visual exploration, use the PDF, the CSV and the HTML panel respectively.

11. Glossary

• Merger filing: a corporate transaction submitted to CADE under article 88.
• Applicant: the party filing the transaction, which may be buyer, seller or target.
• Shareholder records: the base used to resolve economic groups.
• Summary and ordinary procedure: fast-track review and in-depth review.
• Horizontal, vertical and conglomerate: the competitive relationship between the parties.
• Holding reclassification: inference of the operating sector when the party is a holding or fund.
• High confidence: a field derived from a direct registration-number match in the Revenue base.