In the 11 participating countries, with Serbia as a new entry, 2,527 transactions were tracked totaling at USD 163bn (USD 161.3bn excluding Serbia) compared to 1,848 deals worth USD 91bn in 2005. Despite upbeat figures showing overall momentum in CEE, the region’s monolithic look of continuous growth and emerging opportunities lost its shine. While combustion engines of the region, such as Russia, the Czech Republic and Poland shifted into a higher gear in terms of producing growing deal volume and market size, others throttled M&A activity. However, overall the entire CEE remained strong and bold with new stars on the horizon such as Ukraine and Serbia.
M&A trends in Europe
The European M&A market achieved its strongest performance in recent history by hosting 5,216 transactions worth USD 1.33 trillion in the year 2006. This represents a 31% increase on 2005 deal value (source: MergerMarket). The major fundamental expected to pave the way for growth is the long-awaited consolidation accelerated by the single market, common currency and removal of protective regulatory regimes.
The three biggest completed deals in Europe were Arcelor Mittal’s USD 35.9bn acquisition of Arcelor; Intesa Sanpaolo’s EUR 34.5bn purchase of Sanpaolo Imi and Grupo Ferrovial Consortium’s USD 27.4bn acquisition of BAA. The average of the top 5 deals equals USD 26.8bn – Bloomberg reported – with the total value of public deals greatest in banking (USD 262bn), financial services (USD 260bn) and energy & utilities (USD 227bn).
The CEE M&A market represents approximately 12% of the European market (including Russia) compared with 9% in 2005. By overlapping Europe’s M&A market value growth significantly, the CEE region carved a considerably larger share of the European market in 2006.
