For dealmakers across the world, the third quarter was one of the best and one of the worst in recent history.
Megadeals tallied a stunning $1.26 trillion in global mergers and acquisitions during the third quarter – up 40% year over year – making it the second-best third quarter on record by deal value for the three months ended Sept. 30, according to Dealogic data. But a paltry 8,912 deals were signed, down 16% from last year, the worst third-quarter for deal volume in 20 years, data show.
It’s a peculiar time for dealmakers, who came into 2025 with lofty predictions of a banner year following U.S. President Donald Trump’s election. But Trump’s punishing tariffs unleashed on Liberation Day and a continued antitrust crackdown on Big Tech sent markets gyrating in the second quarter, prompting many corporations to delay M&A and IPO plans while the trade negotiations played out.
Pent-up company demand coupled with fresh stock market highs has unleashed a flurry of big deals and IPOs in recent months that have salvaged an otherwise moribund year for the industry. Fewer deals are getting signed, but the average size has surged to $141.4 million during the third quarter, up from $85.5 million during the same time last year, data show.
“The second quarter was lining up to be quite exciting, and then Liberation Day happened right at the beginning. People, understandably, took a little bit of the foot off the pedal, trying to understand the implications,” Naveen Nataraj, co-head of U.S. investment banking at Evercore, told Reuters in an interview. “As the year has progressed, there’s growing comfort that the tariff landscape is going to land in a place that people are able to navigate.”
Several big, splashy initial public offerings that were pulled in April, including ticket reseller StubHub’s $800 million IPO and buy-now-pay-later fintech company Klarna’s $1.37 billion trading debut, helped revive the IPO market earlier this month. Still roughly 987 companies across the world raised some $115 billion in their IPOs so far this year, down 24% and 9% respectively over the same period last year.
In Europe some IPOs are getting done again.
“The relatively subdued IPO issuance we have seen since September last year is mainly because we hadn’t seen high-quality, large-cap companies come to market, but now we are starting to see that,” said Martin Thorneycroft, global co-head of equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley.