Blogs/Vlogs

Bumper year for UK M&A

5 February 2019

After managing to survive the unofficial longest month of the year (as it sometimes feels!), it can often be a good time to have a look back on activity in the previous year to see how the M&A landscape looked across 2018.

With this in mind, the UK and Republic of Ireland M&A Review for 2018 was released not too long ago by Experian Market IQ. The review shows 2018 was a bumper year for the UK M&A market with 7,539 deals announced during 2018, an increase of 2.3% on 2017, and 25% over the ten-year average since 2009 of just over 6,000 deals per year.

This stellar return was the highest number of annual transactions on Experian’s record and could be said to further the case put forward in the previous blog written by my colleague Adnan Sajid, ‘Brexit, what Brexit?’.

Not only was the number of deals on the increase; according to the report, a number of high-value ‘mega’ deals pushed the total value of UK M&A to £372bn, a 38% increase on 2017. Activity in the North also saw a marked increase as the North West, Yorkshire & Humber and North East regions saw deal volumes increase by 10.56%, 19.44%, and 26.96% respectively.

Given the conversations that we are currently having with clients and contacts, and the healthy pipeline already underway at the start of 2019, we are hopeful that these levels of activity will continue throughout 2019, despite the potential for an uncertain operating climate.

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact me or visit our Corporate Finance page.

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