A banner year for mergers and acquisitions will be followed by more deals next year as executives grow more confident in the strength of the US economy, according to the consultancy company EY.
On Monday, drugmaker Merck announced that it was spending US$8.4 billion to buy Cubist Pharmaceuticals in another sign of the recovering confidence in the market for mergers and acquisitions.
The tie-up helped boost the total value of global deals this year so far to US$3.4 trillion. Even if there are not any more big deals announced this year, it would be the best year since a total of US$4.6 trillion of deals were struck in 2007, according to financial data provider Dealogic.
Executives are becoming more confident about the prospects for growth as the US economy continues to strengthen, despite sluggishness overseas.
A more stable atmosphere in Washington is also helping to build up confidence, said Rich Jeanneret, EY Americas vice chair of transaction advisory services.
For investors, that is a welcome change from a recent pattern of spats among lawmakers in recent years that held up spending bills and threatened to bring the country close to defaulting on its debt.
“Brick by brick we’re building a strong economy, and I think that’s really boding well for the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] environment,” Jeanneret said. “Executives have confidence in this market.”
The outlook for deals is also being helped by the huge cash piles that companies have built up in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Companies listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index hold about US$1.2 trillion in cash and cash-equivalent securities, according to S&P Capital IQ. That is close to a record.
The increase in deals has been one of the factors that sent stock indices up to record levels this year. Mergers are typically good for stock prices, at least for the companies being bought, because the acquiring company normally pays a premium to ensure that the deal is approved by shareholders of the company being acquired.
For example, Cubist’s stock surged after Merck offered to pay US$102 per share of Cubist, a 37 percent premium to its closing price on Friday.
Still, mergers are not all good news.
If a tie-up is between two companies in the same field then job cuts often result as the companies try to seek greater efficiencies by cutting headcount.
This year, a wave of mergers was also driven by US companies seeking so-called tax inversions. By acquiring an overseas company, the US business can reincorporate its business overseas in a jurisdiction with lower taxes, allowing the company to lower its tax rate. The tactic drew criticism from US President Barack Obama, who described them as unpatriotic because they were eroding the US’ tax base.
Of course, sometimes mergers just do not work out. AOL’s takeover of Time Warner at the peak of the Internet bubble is a classic example. Time Warner wound up spinning off AOL in May 2009, nine years after a US$166 billion merger at the peak of the Internet bubble.
In 2002 and 2003, Time Warner absorbed nearly US$100 billion in charges to account for the rapidly diminishing value of the combined company, as AOL’s subscription revenues plunged as its dial-up services were replaced by broadband connections.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS