Banks dominate data on mergers and acquisitions

This year’s mergers and acquisitions have seen an increase in the total value of transactions. Provisional data show that, in the first 11 months of the year, transactions already completed add up to more than those recorded over the full 12 months of 2018.

The number of transactions so far this year is not as many as the whole of 2018 (42 against 51 last year), but their total value of 4.3 billion euros is already far above the 3.8 billion euros that changed hands in January-December 2018.

The main forces in M&As this year have been the banks and the state sell-off fund (TAIPED), just as in 2018. This conveys the dominance of forced divestment from assets mostly owned by the credit institutions and the state.

The precise amount of 4.26 billion euros concerns M&A transactions already published, but there are many agreements whose transaction value has not been made public. The figure also excludes a series of transactions that concern property sales through online auctions usually implemented by the banks and TAIPED.

However, for the first time, the statistics also include the transfers of nonperforming exposures – i.e. the concession of banks’ bad loans. Inevitably, banks dominate the M&A data, with 46 percent of transactions this year being related to them, either through non-core assets or bad loans.