Stats › Listings, IPOs and corporate actions › M&A activity
Global mergers and acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions is just companies buying other companies. It sounds like a subject for bankers rather than for anyone holding an index fund, and that's roughly why I wanted a page on it. When a listed company gets bought, it stops being listed. Do that often enough for long enough and the pool of businesses you can actually own in public markets gets smaller, year after year, quietly.
What's here is the 2025 picture: total deal value, how much of it came from a handful of very large deals, what buyers paid on average, where the money went by sector, and the share of overall corporate cash that deals accounted for, which is a figure hardly anyone quotes and is the most surprising number on the page. Then the link that makes the whole thing matter to an ordinary investor, which is the long slide in the number of US listed companies and why new listings haven't been filling the gap.
One thing to hold onto as you read, and it's the reason I keep repeating it further down. Everything on this page measures activity, not outcomes. Knowing that $4.8 trillion changed hands tells you nothing about whether it was money well spent. The figures come from a small number of published reports, dated and linked at the foot of the page, and I'd rather you clicked through and read them than took my summary as the last word.
Global M&A deal value reached $4.8 trillion in 2025, up 36% on 2024 and the second highest total on record, with deal count up about 5%. Deals of $5 billion or more contributed 75% of the growth in strategic deal value, and about 40% of those were transformative, meaning larger than half the acquirer's market capitalisation. Average valuations were 11.6x EV/EBITDA. M&A is also the mechanism behind the long decline in listed company counts: every completed acquisition of a public company removes one from the market permanently.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 2 named sources, roughly 1250 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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