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Indian firms M&A deals touch $14 Billion in 45 days in 2010
si Team
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
India companies have once again started to splurge this year, with the domestic firms announcing merger and acquisition deals worth a whopping $14 billion in just 45 days.

The way the companies have been shopping, it looks like the year 2010 is all set to overtake the M&A deal tally of 2009 by a huge margin. In just 45-days of 2010, Indian firms have announced deals worth $14 billion, while in the year 2009, it had made deals worth $11.9 billion.

According to the monthly deal report of VCCEdge, a financial research provider, the M&A deal value during January 2010 stood at $2.8 billion.Yesterday's $10.7 billion Bharti-Zain offer, wherein Bharti intends to buy Kuwait-based Zain telecom's mobile operations in Africa, takes the total kitty to over $14 billion.

In terms of deal size, the Bharti-Zain deal would be the third largest transaction involving an Indian firm after an estimated $13.5 billion offer by Reliance to get control of the bankrupt petrochemicals firm LyondellBasell Industries and the Tata Steel's takeover of Europe-based Corus for $12 billion. The Bharti-Zain deal could catapult Bharti Airtel in the league of world's top 10 telecom operators.

Some of the other mega M&A deals involving an Indian entity are -- the Vodafone Hutchison deal ($10.8 billion), the Hindalco-Novelis transaction ($6 billion), Daiichi- Ranbaxy ($4.50 billion), ONGC-Imperial ($2.80 billion) and NTT DOCOMO-Tata Teleservices ($2.70 billion).

In 2009, the global economic slowdown had forced corporate India to look largely within the country for merger and acquisitions, as domestic deals accounted for about 60 percent of the $12-billion worth of deals.

The trend seems to be reversing as Indian companies have started to venture out and have announced or are reported to have interests in some multi-billion dollar outbound deals, such as the estimated $13.5 billion takeover of LyondellBasell by Mukesh Ambani-led RIL and the recent Bharti-Zain deal.

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