Feb 26 (Reuters) – European investors gathered in Berlin for the annual SuperReturn conference are reluctant to toast the return of big-ticket takeovers in 2013, even though U.S. peers have long since popped the champagne corks.
Buy-out houses, which buy and sell companies for profit, have agreed some $72.6 billion of deals so far in 2013, up 209 percent from the same period last year but a far cry from 2007 when $200 billion worth of deals were done in the first quarter.
So far this year, 86.8 percent of deals by value have been completed in the Americas, Thomson Reuters data show. Europe has accounted for 10.6 percent of global activity, with $7.7 billion worth of deals agreed.
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