Despite its bad reputation for backing out of deals, private equity has managed to avoid Thomson Reuters’ list of the largest withdrawn M&A bids. It was released today in honor of the largest pulled bid of all time, BHP Billiton’s $188 million offer for Rio Tinto.
The entry level price for the list is $54 billion (a French deal), which means even BCE, at $46.8 billion, wouldn’t have qualified had the consortia walked away. So in a quasi-PR win, PE gets a pass today. Baby steps.
For posterity’s sake, thus far in Q4, the US has had $362 billion in deal announcements and $322 billion in cancellations, according to Thomson Reuters. That looks pretty bad compared with last quarter, where a mere $110 billion worth of deals were canceled, with $649 billion completed. The hope is that any deal with a sliver of a chance of getting done will get pushed through by the end of the year, which could help that near 1:1 ratio. BCE is the remaining go-go era holdover deal that has yet to close.
Download the accompanying chart here:
Top Ten Withdrawn Deals, All Pending Deals, and YOY Comparision of Completed/Cancelled Deals
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