LONDON: Global mergers and acquisitions have already reached $2 trillion in 2018, a record for the value of deals in the period, Thomson Reuters data showed on Tuesday.

A flurry of deals at the start of the week, particularly in the United States with the $11.1 billion merger of GE’s transportation business and rail equipment maker Wabtec, helped reach the milestone. The last two periods when M&A reached similar levels were in 2007 ($1.8tr), a year before the financial crisis and in 2000 ($1.5tr), just before the bursting of the dot.com bubble of technology and internet related stocks.

About $28 billion in US deals were announced on Monday, with activity in power, financials, and real estate. Europe has also seen a deals boom, with April recording the highest value of monthly deals in 10 years, Thomson Reuters data shows, while M&A activity between the United States and Britain hit a 19-year high of $89.6 billion. And globally, M&A shows no sign of pausing, with Sony Corp saying on Tuesday it would pay $2.3bn for control of EMI, becoming the world’s largest music publisher. Meanwhile, German conglomerate Bayer is closing in on a $62.5bn takeover of US Monsanto.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2018