Contact: Brenon Daly
With all due respect to T.S. Eliot, April actually turned out to be a pretty kind month, at least for dealmakers. (The poet’s justifiably renowned work, The Waste Land, begins, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land….”) The number of transactions announced in the just-completed month hit the highest level we’ve seen so far in 2009. Indeed, it was the largest monthly tally since October, when Wall Street truly looked like a wasteland.
The surge in M&A spending is even more noteworthy. The aggregate value of announced deals in April was roughly $21bn, the richest single monthly total since June 2008. In fact, tech shoppers spent substantially more in April alone than they had in the previous four months combined (December 1, 2008-March 31, 2009: $16bn). We’ve noted some of the encouraging signs in the M&A market that could continue to boost shopping through the rest of the year. Maybe 2009 won’t be such a cruel year for dealmaking after all.
Deal flow, 2009
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase