After a Busy Year for Deals, Get Ready for More
“The primary driver is this AI gold rush,” says one adviser. Plus, Thales’s Pascal Bouchiat on European defense spending, Ukraine and a satellite merger.
AI was one reason IBM pursued an $11 billion deal to buy data-streaming platform Confluent.
Photo credit: Scott Eells
Welcome to CFO Briefing, a newsletter dedicated to corporate finance and what leaders need to know. This week, I talk to CFOs about their appetite for dealmaking in 2026 and chat with Pascal Bouchiat, finance chief of European defense and aerospace firm Thales.
Ask any adviser, banker or CFO about the outlook for dealmaking, and they will most likely tell you that they expect more and bigger transactions in the year to come. They had the same high hopes heading into 2025, and barring a few speedbumps early on, those predictions ended up being spot on: The year is on track to become one of the best for global M&A since at least 1995, with deal values expected to hit $4.8 trillion, up 36% from the prior year, according to consulting firm Bain. M&A was skewed toward bigger deals, with deal count 5% higher than in 2024, the firm found.