January 24, 2022
Mega Deals: More Common Than You Might Think
Last week, I blogged about the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard deal, which has a nearly $70 billion price tag and is a “mega deal” by any definition. Deals this big don’t happen every day, but this analysis from Bloomberg Law’s Grace Maral Burnett says that both “mega deals” with valuations in excess of $10 billion and “mega mega” deals with valuations of more than $50 billion happen more frequently than you might think. Here’s an excerpt:
The past decade has seen the announcements of 301 mega deals, each valued at $10 billion or greater, that are either completed or are currently pending with definitive agreements in place. Counting the number of days between these announcements reveals an impressive frequency of one deal every 12 days. Meanwhile, the average period between mega mega deals—the 26 of these deals valued at $50 billion-plus—was 122 days. That’s a huge deal announced roughly every four months.
In fact, the Microsoft-Activision deal broke the decade’s longest mega mega deal drought. Grace says nearly two and a half years separated the announcement of that deal and the 2019 announcement of the $84 billion Allergan-AbbVie deal.
If you go to Grace’s Twitter feed, you’ll find a cool interactive graphic that plots the date and size of each M&A deal over $10 billion since 2012. While you’re there, you should give her a follow if you’re not following her already.
– John Jenkins