Dealmakers’ $35 Billion Merger Monday Sets Up Big Finish to 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Dealmakers got their first real taste of a post-US election M&A bump on Monday, with roughly $35 billion worth of transactions struck in sectors ranging from banking to building materials.
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The largest announcement came in the US, where Quikrete Holdings Inc. has agreed to acquire Summit Materials Inc. for about $11.5 billion including debt, as it seeks to capture a bigger share of the US building materials market. Bloomberg News reported Quikrete’s approach last month.
There was a transaction of a similar size in Europe, as Italian bank UniCredit SpA made a €10 billion ($10.5 billion) all-share bid for domestic rival Banco BPM SpA. UniCredit’s CEO, Andrea Orcel, wants to move his lender into the top echelons of European banking and is separately weighing a bid for Germany’s Commerzbank AG.
Other notable deals struck on Monday included Anglo American Plc agreeing to sell its steelmaking coal business to Peabody Energy Corp. for a price that could rise to as much as $3.78 billion. And in Canada, mutual fund manager CI Financial Corp. plans to go private for about C$4.7 billion ($3.4 billion) in a deal backed by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital.
Mergers and acquisitions bankers have had their tails up in recent weeks, buoyed by a belief that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election will help turbocharge the recovery in global dealmaking. Falling interest rates had already put M&A activity back on an upward trajectory in 2024 after two difficult years, with private equity firms among the main beneficiaries of a more favorable financing environment.
Monday’s haul brings global deal values to within touching distance of $3 trillion for the year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. This month, Amcor Plc has agreed to acquire Berry Global Group Inc. for about $8.4 billion in a combination of two of the world’s biggest makers of packaging, and Charter Communications Inc. said it will buy Liberty Broadband Corp. in an all-stock transaction. On Sunday, US pipeline operator Oneok Inc. announced its purchase of the common units of EnLink Midstream LLC it doesn’t own for $4.3 billion.
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