The biggest deals and attempted deals in merger and acquisition activity in the last 10 years

This was a year of mega deals. Think Raytheon Company and United Technologies’ $135 billion merger; AbbVie’s takeover of Allergan; and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s $74 billion acquisition of Celgene.

So as the decade ends, Yahoo Finance takes a look at merger and acquisition activity. Each year in this decade there was an average of 83 mega deals, with over $5 billion in deal size. While the average number of such deals in the last decade was 67. Not only are there more deals, the deals are also larger in value. The mega deals in 2007, a year when M&A activity spiked, were about $11 billion on average. This year, the average value of a mega deal is about $22 billion.

“Companies are continuing to get larger. There are fewer of them though,” said Curt Moldenhauer, U.S. deals solutions leader at PWC. “U.S. companies themselves generating a ton of profits for the last decade, and more companies are using the money on their own balance sheet to finance deals.”

Mega deals used to be funded primarily by bank borrowing and company stock, but in this decade, bonds, leveraged loans and cash are taking a bigger role in M&A deals. IBM bought Red Hat last year in a $34 billion deal that was wholly funded by cash.

[See also: The stock market's biggest winners and losers of the past decade]

And the mega-deal trend in M&A could be recession-proof, according to Moldenhauer. Corporate America has over $2.2 trillion in cash sitting on their balance sheets — the highest in decades. Leveraged buyouts and bonds as sources of fundings are less impacted by the recession, compared to banks and stocks.

“Even if potentially there’s an economic downturn, we believe that the M&A market will continue to be relatively strong,” said Moldenhauer. “Because there is so much capital available.”

For more of this story click here:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-biggest-deals-and-attempted-deals-of-the-2010s-180117621.html


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