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Spring is here (or is it?) and animal spirits are back (or are they?)!
Apollo’s Torsten Sløk offered valuable insight into the current state of the market: aggregate 2026 M&A volume looks hot largely because a handful of blockbuster transactions are doing the heavy lifting, while average and medium-sized deals remain slow (other than biotech).
Sløk noted that year-to-date volume for deals over $10 billion is almost three times the volume of sub-$500 million deals and nearly double the volume of deals between $1 billion and $5 billion. Translation: “a handful of blockbuster deals are dominating the headline numbers,” while the day-to-day market remains relatively quiet.
This K-shaped deal market tracks with what pundits predicted coming out of the Tulane Law Conference in March: an uneven upswing led by large, record-breaking deals. This has played out further over the past few weeks with plenty of examples across industries and geographies: Kone’s $24 billion deal for Germany’s TK Elevator, Brad Jacobs’ QXO making headlines again with its $17 billion purchase of TopBuild, BMG/Concord’s $14 billion music tie-up and India’s Sun Pharma reaching an $11.75 billion deal for Organon, just to name a few.
In airlines, an industry fraught with politics and regulatory turbulence for dealmaking, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby showcased a different M&A strategy on Monday when he issued a lengthy statement publicly laying out the rationale for a potential tie-up with American Airlines, a public approach after American passed on entering discussions about a deal.
In other words, mega-deals are back, although it seems that a good chunk of the market is still moving more cautiously than some headlines suggest.
See you all at Milken,
GPP team
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