(Bloomberg) -- Dealmakers got their first real taste of a post-US election M&A bump on Monday, with roughly $35 billion worth of transactions struck in sectors ranging from banking to building materials.
The largest announcement came in the US, where Quikrete Holdings Inc. has agreed to acquire Summit Materials Inc. for about $11.5 billion including debt, as it seeks to capture a bigger share of the US building materials market. Bloomberg News reported Quikrete’s approach last month.
There was a transaction of a similar size in Europe, as Italian bank UniCredit SpA made a €10 billion ($10.5 billion) all-share bid for domestic rival Banco BPM SpA. UniCredit’s CEO, Andrea Orcel, wants to move his lender into the top echelons of European banking and is separately weighing a bid for Germany’s Commerzbank AG.
Other notable deals struck on Monday included Anglo American Plc agreeing to sell its steelmaking coal business to Peabody Energy Corp. for a price that could rise to as much as $3.78 billion. And in Canada, mutual fund manager CI Financial Corp. plans to go private for about C$4.7 billion ($3.4 billion) in a deal backed by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital.
Mergers and acquisitions bankers have had their tails up in recent weeks, buoyed by a belief that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election will help turbocharge the recovery in global dealmaking. Falling interest rates had already put M&A activity back on an upward trajectory in 2024 after two difficult years, with private equity firms among the main beneficiaries of a more favorable financing environment.
Monday’s haul brings global deal values to within touching distance of $3 trillion for the year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. This month, Amcor Plc has agreed to acquire Berry Global Group Inc. for about $8.4 billion in a combination of two of the world’s biggest makers of packaging, and Charter Communications Inc. said it will buy Liberty Broadband Corp. in an all-stock transaction. On Sunday, US pipeline operator Oneok Inc. announced its purchase of the common units of EnLink Midstream LLC it doesn’t own for $4.3 billion.
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