British mergers will bounce back

Mergers and acquisitions involving British firms fell to a three-year low last year. But though the value of deals fell, the number of transactions was only slightly down on 2015.

Andrew Van Sickle
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published

Mergers and acquisitions involving British firms fell to a three-year low last year. Deal volumes totalled $355bn, down from $603bn in 2015.

The global backdrop was partly to blame, with fears over Chinese growth last January and jitters over the US presidential election result unnerving investors. The Brexit vote and the immediate resignation of David Cameron "added to the sense of unease", as Deirdre Hipwell notes in The Times.

Still, it's hardly all gloom. The value of deals may have slid, but the actual number of transactions was only slightly down on 2015: 2,318 compared to 2,669. Traders should have got used to Brexit uncertainty by now and the fall in sterling means "buying British has never been cheaper", so more foreign buyers should eye up our market. ITV and industrial software group Aveva are among potential takeover targets this year, says stockbroker AJ Bell.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Andrew Van Sickle

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.

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