Mergers Hit a 7-Year High, Propelled by a Series of Blockbuster Deals

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/propelled-by-a-series-of-blockbuster-deals-mergers-hit-a-7-year-high/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&

Deal makers have been thinking big this year.

Buoyed by some of the biggest deals in recent memory, 2014 has so far been the kind of year that bankers and lawyers have been awaiting for some time.

“People are willing to make bigger bets on transactions than they were two years ago,” said Stephen Arcano, a partner at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

And it appears that the factors that have been driving the waves of consolidation will keep propelling mergers for the rest of the year.

At first glance, many of the statistics that define merger activity for the first half of the year are eye-popping: Deals worth nearly $1.77 trillion were announced in the first six months of 2014, according to Thomson Reuters, up nearly 73 percent from the period a year earlier and more than in the first six months of any year since 2007.

Much of that was spurred by a smattering of blockbuster transactions, like AT&T’s $48.5 billion bid for DirecTV; Comcast’s $45 billion offer for Time Warner Cable; and Facebook’s $19 billion deal for WhatsApp. Over all, 18,217 deals have been announced, down 0.4 percent from the period a year earlier and the lowest level of announced transactions since 2005.

In the high end of the market, however, business is booming. Forty-six deals worth more than $5 billion have been announced this year, 130 percent more than last year. The difference is even starker on a dollar basis: these announced