The M&A market keeps changing in unexpected ways
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If you want to understand dealmaking in 2025, look at the conventional wisdom and then reverse it.
- The year began with great optimism, but the first quarter was quiet.
- The second quarter began with "Liberation Day," which was supposed to scare off any remaining animal spirits. Instead, it was followed by a megamerger surge, according to preliminary data released Thursday by LSEG.
By the numbers: There was around $1.89 trillion of global M&A activity announced in the first half of 2025, which is a 30% increase over the first half of 2024.
- The year-over-year figure had been negative 11% in Q1.
- Deal volume also rebounded in the second quarter, but for the half remained down 11% YoY and is at a decade low.
- The discrepancy can be explained by a 74% year-over-year increase in the number of deals worth at least $10 billion and a 24% bump in the number of deals worth between $5 billion and $10 billion.
- Private equity activity followed a similar trend, with first-half dollars up 24.2% but deal numbers down 22%.
Zoom in: The U.S. trailed the global M&A market with $821 billion in activity, up 10.8%, with a 15.2% decline in the number of deals.
- The year's largest deal announced so far was Charter Communications' $34.5 billion purchase of Cox Communications, followed by the proposed privatization of Japan's Toyota Industries.
- Global investment banking league tables remained the same year-over-year, with Goldman Sachs leading. It was followed by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Citigroup.
What they're saying: "Usually there's a backlog of financial sponsor deals that come at the end of the quarter, which we didn't really see, but the real drag from a volume perspective is in middle-market and lower-end deals," explains Matthew Toole, director of deals intelligence for LSEG Data & Analytics.
- "Dealmaking is certainly a sector-by-sector story right now," he adds, pointing out double-digit dollar declines for health care and financials and double-digit dollar increases for media and industrials. Plus, a deal number bump for real estate.
The intrigue: LSEG includes "venture capital" investments of at least $1 billion in its M&A totals, which never really mattered until the recent spate of mega-rounds for OpenAI and its ilk.
