M&A deals worth $463.6 billion have been announced this month, up 30% from last year, including Trump Media & Technology Group with IBM’s nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, the $11 billion acquisition of data infrastructure company Confluent, and a bidding war between Paramount Skydance and Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery, according to data compiled by Dealogic.
“This is the quest and the end, and we all enjoy it,” said Charles Ruck, a partner at Latham & Watkins, who is advising Paramount on its bid for Warner Bros. “I don’t tell anyone not to travel. I tell them that wherever they are, they might need some of their time.”
This weekend, a group of private equity firms led by Permira and Warburg Pincus signed a deal to buy accounting and investment software maker Clearwater Analytics Holdings for about $8.4 billion, including debt. “It’s a very active, broad-based sector… we’re seeing quite a bit of activity across most of our industry sectors,” said John Collins, global head of mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.
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Bidding war for Warner Bros.
This holiday season is shaping up to be one of the busiest in recent years, according to interviews with about a dozen bankers and legal advisers. Citigroup investment bankers said last month was the busiest November in years.
Business operators from New York to London to Hong Kong say they are trying to close numerous multimillion-dollar deals before the end of the year in Times Square. As top executives become more aggressive, several large companies are looking to hire advisors before the end of the year to close big deals in 2026.
Two business operators in London and New York say they plan to work through the holidays, while some are optimistic they will take Christmas Day and, hopefully, Christmas Eve off as well.
This could be more difficult for the bankers, consultants and public relations professionals working on the Warner Bros. deal. The bidding keeps them glued to their phones and laptops through the holidays, and some will work through Christmas. On Monday, Paramount revised its $108.4 billion hostile bid, jointly funded by RedBird Capital Partners, with a deadline extended to Jan. 21.
“We will be working through the holidays and the first week of January to communicate the merits of our offer to shareholders,” RedBird founder and chief investment officer Gerry Cardinale said on CNBC on Monday. This is by no means the only deal in the works.
Latham’s Ruck, who declined to discuss negotiations with Warner Bros., told Reuters last week that the firm expected to announce at least four more deals in the next two weeks. “Our team understands it without me saying it,” he said. “They recognize that this is a magical moment, that these magical moments do not last forever, that we are at the forefront, with innovative agreements.”
This has been a banner year for deal negotiators after the trade war launched by US President Donald Trump derailed activity in the second quarter.
Globally, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity surpassed $4.8 trillion last week, making it the second-best year on record after 2021, when near-zero interest rates and COVID-19 economic stimulus drove M&A to more than $6 trillion.
With information from Reuters.
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