NZ takeover activity crunched
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By DAVID HARGREAVES - BusinessDay.co.nz | Monday, 06 October 2008 |
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The credit crunch has well and truly knocked takeover and merger activity in New Zealand.
M&A activity slumped to its lowest level for over six years in the September quarter, according to figures from Thomson Reuters.
Deals worth just US$494.9 million ($755 million) were either announced or consummated during the three months to September. This is a far cry from soaring levels of activity seen in recent years.
For the nine months to September deals amounted to just US$3.7 billion - less than half the US$8.3 billion for the same period a year earlier.
The now defunct Lehman Brothers topped the fees table for advisers on completed deals during the period with US$17.2 million.
In the latest nine months the biggest deal completed was Vector's US$616.5 million sale of its Wellington electricity network to Cheung Kong Infrastructure.
Last year the market was abuzz with some massive deals including the sale of Telecom's Yellow Pages operation, Fletcher Building's acquisition of Formica and Ironbridge's takeover of CanWest MediaWorks(NZ) - the owner of TV3 and a number of radio operations.
The global credit crisis has also taken the wind out of M&A activity across the Tasman - although less spectacularly so.
Deals announced or done totalled US$108.7 billion in the first nine months of the year in Australia, compared with U$144.1 billion for the same period in 2007.
The slowdown in Australia pretty much mirrored the position seen for the whole of the world, in which M&A activity totalled US$2.5 trillion for the nine months - down 25 per cent on the same time a year ago.
