Deals touch a decadal high in April

Mumbai: Deal numbers, including private equity investments and mergers and acquisitions, touched a decadal high for any month at 161 in April, even as the country faced the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a report said on Tuesday.

The total value of the transactions in April stood at over $13 billion, the report by Grant Thornton, a consultancy, said, pointing out that domestic M&A transactions led the pack by reporting over 30 transactions aggregating to $5 billion.

“While the second wave of the pandemic is threatening to delay the current pace of economic recovery, the current level of economic activities does not seem to have suffered significantly from the localised lockdowns yet,” Grant Thornton partner Prashant Mehra said.

By number of deals, the transactions more than doubled to 161 in April when compared to the year-ago period which was marred by a nationwide lockdown, while the deal values are 50 per cent higher.

When compared with March 2021, the activity in April witnessed heightened activity with deal volumes up by 18 per cent and deal values spiking by 174 per cent, the report said. There were 42 merger and acquisition transactions totalling to $5.5 billion in the month on an overall basis.

While deal volumes increased more than twice the deal volumes when compared to last year, deal values fell by 30 per cent because of the Facebook-Jio Platform deal valued at $5.7 billion in the last year. Barring this deal, April 2021 recorded 2.5 times increase in deal values.

Domestic deal activity accounted for 91 per cent of the overall M&A deal volumes and 76 per cent of the deal values in April 2021, it said. April 2021 witnessed record PE activity both in terms of deal values and volumes with 119 investments aggregating to $7.6 billion, the highest PE activity in any month since 2011.

The month saw five start-up/e-commerce companies join the esteem unicorn club making a historic month for the Indian startup ecosystem. IT and IT Enabled Services, e-commerce, education, manufacturing and energy and natural resources dominated the deal activity.