By all accounts, last year was a banner year for mergers, but a new survey has found that significantly fewer deal-makers believe that 2015 will prove any better, The New York Times DealBook reported yesterday. About 54 percent of deal specialists surveyed by the Brunswick Group believe that 2015 will surpass last year in terms of global merger activity, as compared with a heady 78 percent last year. The remaining respondents were evenly split between believing that deal activity will decrease and stay the same. The survey is not necessarily surprising; nearly $3.5 trillion worth of transactions was announced last year, including mega-deals like Comcast’s $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable and AT&T’s $49 billion offer for DirecTV. Conditions remain ripe for more wheeling and dealing, according to the Brunswick Group survey. Nearly three out of four respondents in North America said that they believed that shareholder activism — in which hedge fund managers or other investors publicly push for changes to corporate strategy — would drive corporate mergers or break-ups, compared to the 28 percent of respondents in Brunswick’s 2012 survey who believed the same.
