M&A Pulse

M&A activity by announcement month

Each column is the number of deals announced that month, dated by the merger agreement where the filing states one. Read the shape, not the 3 most recent columns: a proxy reaches the SEC a median of 52 days after the agreement it discloses, so a month is only complete about 90 days after it ends. The muted columns fill in as the filings land.

When an interviewer asks whether the market is busy, this is the honest answer: the count, the direction, and the caveat that the record lags the headlines.

Clicking a column opens that whole year on the tape. The tape has no month in its filters, so a year is as close as its vocabulary gets.

What size deals are getting done?

The median deal was $938m of enterprise value and a quarter were above $4.1bn, across 159 deals with a value. 81 of them were under $1bn. The deals that make the headlines are the tail of this chart, and the ones an analyst is staffed on are usually not.

Enterprise value is equity value at the offer plus net debt at the last balance sheet before the agreement. A deal whose value this page will not stand behind is counted as not computed rather than binned on a figure it does not use elsewhere.

The bands are the deal tape’s own, and clicking one opens every deal that size across the full historical tape, rather than the 170 counted here. The tape filters by year and has no rolling window, so its count is the larger one on purpose.

Who’s buying?

Count and value are shown separately because they answer different questions. A buyer type can sign many small deals and little of the money, or few deals and most of it, and the gap between the two bars is usually the more interesting number.

The unclassified share is shown rather than folded away. The buyer type is read from the names on the filing, and a deal signed through an acquisition vehicle hides whoever stands behind it, which may be a sponsor, a strategic buyer or a consortium of both. Where the filing does not settle it, this page leaves it unsettled.

Clicking a buyer type opens every deal classified to that buyer type across the full Deal Tape, rather than the twelve months split above.

What are buyers paying?

The premium is the offer against the last close before the deal leaked or was announced, as the filing itself states it. The band is the middle half of the market: a premium inside it is ordinary, one outside it needs a reason, and the reason is the interview question. Deals paid partly in stock are kept here, because the premium the filing states is its own arithmetic; they are left out of the multiples on the tape, where the cash figure is not the price.

How is the market changing?

One series, chosen for coverage: the premium is stated in almost every proxy, so each year rests on fifty to a hundred clean readings where a multiple by year would rest on far fewer and mix sectors that trade on different multiples. Premiums widen when share prices have fallen and buyers pay for where a company was, and narrow when the market has already priced the bid in.

Click a year to open its deals on the tape, with the multiples beside the premiums.