M&A Deals in India in 2021: A Round-up

Abstract

Historically, companies have sought growth, synergies, strategic realignment, scope & scale economies, access to resources and capabilities, market entry, resilience, and a lot more, with the help of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Despite disrupting every sphere of our lives, the COVID-19 pandemic presented new opportunities that made certain strategic investments attractive and opened avenues for dealmakers to pursue M&A deals. This article presents a brief overview of M&A activity in the first eleven months of 2021 in India and highlights the investment themes that dominated the M&A landscape in the country. M&A activity involving Indian firms with a known deal value of at least USD 100 million (and meeting additional filtering criteria indicated in the notes of Table 1) showed moderate signs of slowing down in 2020 in terms of the number and the value of deals announced as compared to the previous year. Still, the increase in the aggregate value of these transactions in 2021 showed promising signs of recovery. The analysis of M&A deals meeting the filtering criteria suggests that the total value of M&A transactions that involved Indian firms (as an acquirer or as a target firm) announced in 2020 was around 17% lower than the total value of the similar sample of filtered deals announced in 2019. However, the value of transactions announced between January and November 2021 stood stronger at approximately USD 52.3 billion.