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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andrei Radu" data-source="post: 225123" data-attributes="member: 36777">I definitely agree with you on the tailwinds you mentioned - in fact, from what I have been reading and hearing, global dealmaking has been surging in the last quarter, and some people in the field have actually drawn comparisons to the 2021 boom. Basically, a number of different factors seem to be coming together to enable a boom in M&A and capital markets activity: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dry powder: Post 2022 with the rise of interest rates, a lot of PE funds have chosen to sit on huge pools of capital (estimated in the trillions) rather than enter investments with lower projected rate of returns as a result of the unavailability of cheap debt. This put the industry under pressure, as investors wanted to see their cash put to work. As interest rates have finally come down, a lot of PE funds feel like now is the moment to make up for all the lost time. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Exists pressure: on the other side of the PE industry, the difficult economic conditions and the unavailability of financing made exits difficult. This once again put pressure on PE funds, as they were unable to return money to investors, which led to the rise of secondary funds. Now, a lot of PE funds that have been keeping portfolio companies longer than they wanted to see this as a perfect moment to sell to larger corporates or list on a public stock exchange. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Pent up appetite for corporates: on the strategic side of M&A, because of the difficult macroeconomic environment of the last few years, corporates have generally been holding back from big transactions. This led to many deals that would have normally been more spread out over the last few years be postponed, and now that global markets see this period as of one of relative stability, there is a lot of pent up demand for M&A deals.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Reduced worries around trade policy: Looking only at year back, there was a lot of optimism about the economy and about a rebound in dealmaking after the election of Trump, who thought to have a strong pro-business economic policy. That was all brought to a halt by the imposition of high tariffs on many trade partners and by all the chaos that followed. Nonetheless, overall tariffs ended up being scaled down significantly, and things seem to have broadly calmed down on the trade policy end. This alleviates many macroeconomic worries and makes businesses a lot more willing to pursue cross-border M&A deals; </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A more relaxed merger control regime: with the Trump presidency in the US and a more pro-business EU Commission agenda, competition authorities have become a lot more willing to green light deals in the last year, which once again alleviates a major worry companies have when contemplating large deals. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">AI investments: as there is an ever growing demand for chips and for data centres to service generative AI usage, there has been huge investment in the area, leading to a boom in tech M&A; </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Uncertainty, leading to a need for scale and diversification: While uncertainty is normally thought to negatively affect M&A, in the current environment it arguably has the opposite effect. As investments in AI are reaching multiple trillion dollars figures and there are increasing worries of a bubble forming as a result of relatively unimpressive returns, many companies are unsure as to where the most value truly lies in the supply chain for AI tech, and, to an even larger extent, are unsure as to what the future role of AI in the global economy will be. Thus, there is a need for diversification which can only be achieved through scale: the larger a company is, and the more diversified its business and investments, the more likely it is it will be able to profits irrespective of how things turn up.</li> </ul>If you want to learn more about this topic, I have linked a recent podcast from Goldman Sachs <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/7E0a1m4nooIWFuEXNqZwJ9" target="_blank">here</a>, as it presents a significantly more nuanced and detailed analysis of all these trends.</blockquote>

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