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Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

For all of 2023, global M&A activity dropped 16 percent from a year earlier, to $3.1 trillion - a showing even weaker than the pandemic year of 2020, according to a McKinsey report.

This contrasts with other market benchmarks, such as the S&P 500, which climbed 24 percent last year on the wings of a handful of technology- and AI-driven stocks. A longer-term view shows the depth of M&A's trough in 2023. For example, in the US, the world's busiest M&A market, activity dropped to its lowest proportion of S&P 500 market value in 20 years.

While the average deal size increased 14 percent in 2023, owing to a handful of large deals, the number of companies changing hands fell 27 percent from a year earlier.

With macroeconomic, geopolitical, and regulatory pressures all curbing exuberance, megadeals (over $10 billion) fell 17 percent to $705 billion but maintained their 23 percent share of global deal activity.

The Americas, buoyed by surprisingly strong economic growth and employment figures, remained the most active market for M&A-accounting for more than half of global activity in 2023. Deal value fell 7 percent to $1.6 trillion, a decline that was softened by the activity of programmatic acquirers and a handful of megadeals. Taken together, the value of deals in the Americas for all of 2023 only slightly trails the pandemic-era 2020 total of $1.7 trillion.

Also boosting activity in the Americas was dealmakers' continuing propensity fo......................

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