January 21, 2020—The winter holidays brought with them muted merger and acquisition activity over the past month, with only 11 new U.S. deals announced.
Notable transactions include Woodward’s $7.5 billion merger of equals with Hexcel and Eli Lilly’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Dermira. These deals were noteworthy due to their minuscule takeover premiums of 4.5% and 2.2%, respectively.
Private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice abandoned its takeover of Anixter after being outbid by publicly-traded WESCO, which sealed the $4.5 billion friendly takeover.
Serial-acquiror Brookfield announced the acquisition of Cincinnati Bell for its infrastructure division. It came with a $2.6 billion price tag and a 36% premium.
Brookfield also closed one of the biggest deals over the past month, being its $9.3 billion acquisition of railroad company Genesee & Wyoming. This acquisition was done at 12x EBITDA.
Novartis closed one of the largest biotech deals as of late with its $9.7 billion acquisition of The Medicines Company.
The below AlphaRank Merger Monitor represents Accelerate’s proprietary analytics database on all announced liquid U.S. mergers. The AlphaRank Merger Arbitrage Effective Yield represents the average annualized return of all outstanding merger arbitrage spreads and is typically viewed as an alternative to fixed income yield.
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* AlphaRank is exclusively produced by Accelerate Financial Technologies Inc. (“Accelerate”). Visit AccelerateShares.com for more information.