Despite the accumulation of political and economic crises, the German market for mergers and acquisitions produced more transactions than ever before in the past year.

Only the year 2021 and the period after reunification were more active, when the Treuhand privatized GDR companies on a large scale.

At least that is the result of an evaluation by the consulting firm Oaklins, which always puts the number of takeovers in the foreground and not the takeover volumes like the big statistics service providers and investment banks.

According to the survey, the year brought well over 2,700 transactions with German participation - and thus not much less than the 2,900 transactions that Oaklins identified for the exceptional year 2021.

That punishes all pessimists, said the managing partner Florian von Alten in an interview with the FAZ "Everyone blew on minor tones, the facts look different." Even the "dotcom boom" around the turn of the millennium - the first boom of the Internet companies - brought not as many mergers and acquisitions;

at that time, values ​​around the mark of 2000 transactions were counted annually.

Oaklins – formerly Angermann – specializes in the advisory business with Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) on medium-sized transactions.

The company creates metastatistics based on a series of data sets, accessing the service providers Mergermarket, Majunke and Capital IQ, the German and European statistical authorities Destatis and Eurostat, company press releases and news from the Federal Cartel Office.

Not big, but many

The slight decline in 2022 paints a different picture than that painted by global data service providers such as Dealogic, Refinitiv, Bloomberg and also Mergermarket.

Like international investment banks and merger advisors, they usually focus on the total volume of the transactions.

And according to this benchmark, the market shrank significantly: M&A transactions with German participation totaled 155 billion dollars last year, as Refinitiv calculated as of December 14th: a decrease of a good third (36 percent) compared to the same period of the previous year.

Oaklins, like other mid-market advisors, prefers to look at the number of deals.

As of December 8, the bank counted 2,734 announcements of transactions with German participation – i.e. transactions in which the buyer or the takeover target was German or both.

In 2021, the comparative period had delivered 2910 deals, in the last pre-pandemic year 2019 almost 2300 transactions.

The long-term view spanning around a quarter of a century is particularly impressive: The current value is around two-thirds above the average for all years since 1998. This stands in striking contrast to the gloomy environment that characterized the past year with a whole stack of crises: Ukraine war, inflation , rising interest rates, supply chain difficulties.

What counts as a deal?

Refinitiv also notes that the number of M&A transactions with German participation is falling less than the total volume – however, the drop of almost a quarter (23 percent) is noticeably higher than that determined by Oaklins.

M&A statistics can generally vary widely depending on their parameters.

Some use the announcement of the project as the date for the respective observation period, others the completion.

Transactions are often only recorded above a certain size.

And sometimes it's not even clear what a transaction is.

If the German state takes a stake in Uniper or if Daimler spins off its truck division, as in the previous year, does that count as a takeover?

If a German party is a secondary player in a bidding consortium:

Does the consortium then count as German?

The threshold for a share purchase is also inconsistent: For Oaklins, for example, everything from a 10 percent package counts as a deal.

When the volumes are recorded, the assessments often turn out to be different.