M&A Activity Year-To-Date Is Better Than Before Pandemic

Canadian Lawyer reports on Bennett Jones' Q3 look at the M&A landscape.

Linda Misetich Dann, Christian Gauthier and Harinder Basra say there is a lot of interest in dealmaking, with the latest numbers on M&A activity beating those from before the pandemic. M&A activity has slowed in the first nine months of 2022.

“When we were talking about writing (our Q3 outlook), we decided that it wasn’t really useful making a lot of comparisons of this year to 2021 or 2020, for obvious reasons, the pandemic,” Gauthier tells Canadian Lawyer.

“2020 saw a lot of M&A activity stop because of COVID-19, and 2021 was super, super busy as making deals took off like never before. So, comparing current figures to those before the pandemic makes more sense.”

Looking at M&A volume for the first three quarters of the past five years shows that investors are willing to make deals. While the first three quarters of 2022 saw deal volume drop compared to a recording-breaking number for the same period in 2021, that volume is still higher than the first three quarters of 2019, the last full year not affected by the pandemic.

Bennett Jones' Q3 look at Canada's M&A Landscape Q3 2022: It's Not If, It's When is available here.