M&A MARKET UPDATE AUGUST 2019 U.S. MONTHLY REVIEW
Notable Trends in August 2019
Year to date, U.S. M&A deal activity has decreased on a year over year basis by 32.6%. The YTD completed deal count as of the end of August is 3,418 deals versus 5,068 deals in 2018. Capital invested is also slightly down decreasing 5.2%, going from $644.9 billion YTD in 2018 to $611.4 billion YTD in 2019. Year to date, the median deal size has almost doubled, increasing from $43.3 million in 2018 to $83.2 million in 2019. Even though the amount of completed deals has decreased, the increase in median deal sizes has allowed total capital invested to remain relatively constant.
For the month of August, deal count and invested capital are respectively down 41.7% and 8.2% compared to 2018. Median deal size, on the other hand, is up 9.5%. 2019 saw the largest deal between the two years with Occidental Petroleum’s $38 billion acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum, which was 2.5x bigger than the largest deal in 2018 of Brookfield Asset Management’s $15.3 billion acquisition of General Growth Properties. 2018 had twice as many transactions completed over $1 billon than 2019, 18 to 9.
