Dykema M&A Volume Remains Strong During a Turbulent Year

In our 2022 year-end newsletter we posed the following questions:

• Will significant inflation be in the rear-view mirror by the end of 2023? The answer to this question seems to be "yes."
• Will the re-emergence of China out its pandemic lock-down help to jump start the global economy? China announced last week that its GDP grew by over 5% last year, a significant improvement from 2022, but still behind the hyper-growth China enjoyed in prior years. This seemed to help the U.S. economy as U.S. economic macroeconomic indicators were largely positive.
• Will interest rate increases begin to impact middle market companies to a greater degree than they have thus far? And how will all of this impact the middle market M&A market? Interest rates certainly created headwinds for the M&A market, especially for larger deals that required significant financing. 

With those challenges in mind, we are happy to report that Dykema had a very positive year from an M&A perspective. All told we closed 117 transactions in 2023, only a slight dip from 2022’s record deal volume of 134.

Our median deal size was virtually flat with 2022.

We continued to work on deals in a variety of industries, including insurance, manufacturing, distribution, business services, environmental consulting, dental service, healthcare, agriculture, financial services, software, food and beverage, industrial cleaning, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals.

Based on our Annual M&A Outlook Survey, we enter 2024 with a bit more optimism and a bit less trepidation than last year, and we hope to work on a deal with you this year.

Below are the tombstones from some of our 4th quarter deals.