Who is buying whom, at what price and why. Our researchers look at the bids, the boardroom arguments and what each deal says about the industry it happens in.
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In pharmaceutical M&A, the most expensive mistake is paying a premium for a future that clinical trials may never deliver - and three years on, Seagen's pipeline is testing that thesis.
5 min read
Rearmament has turned defence from an industry private capital avoided into one it is pouring money into, though Europe's governments are increasingly particular about whose money it is.
Three deaths have paused eight Novartis trials and frozen enrolment at Bristol Myers Squibb - turning autoimmune CAR-T from a clinical question into a valuation problem for everyone who has already bought in.
Buyout firms have spent $182bn on UK-listed companies this year while the London Stock Exchange struggles to replace them. Behind the takeover wave sits a tax-driven surge in exits, much of it firms selling to themselves.
Offshore law firms have already sold stakes to private equity. US Big Law is watching, waiting for someone else to go first. The legal industry's long immunity to outside capital is ending, but the terms remain deeply uncertain.
Sony brings the money, Marvel brings the vibes and Peter Parker gets caught in the middle of Hollywood's most profitable frenemy saga.
Big Pharma is acquiring earlier and accepting greater scientific risk for unproven drugs. The driver is not confidence in the science but the fear of a rival securing the next blockbuster first, as a $300bn patent cliff bears down on the industry.
After decades of underinvestment, scientific setbacks and fading industry interest, psychiatry is showing signs of life again. Eli Lilly's acquisition of AtaiBeckley, worth up to $3.8 billion, signals renewed hope that the future of depression treatment may look very different from the past.
EQT needed four bids to take Intertek private, and the sequence reveals less about price than about who now sets the value of a FTSE 100 company, and why London keeps losing profitable firms to private buyers.
Apollo has gatecrashed Castlelake's hard-won takeover of easyJet with a higher offer backed by the airline's board, setting up a bidding war over one of Europe's best-known low-cost carriers just months after a bruising first half of the year.
Vertex's $10 billion acquisition of Crinetics is about far more than adding another drug to its portfolio. It is a strategic bet on an endocrinology platform that could fuel the company's next phase of growth.
A £5.7bn approach for DCC is as much a bet on the Irish conglomerate's years-long transformation into an energy distributor as it is a straightforward take-private deal, and it says as much about KKR's ambitions as it does about DCC itself.
From preferred equity deals for LP stakes to carried interest loans for executives, private equity is manufacturing liquidity at every level of the food chain. The exit market remains blocked. The workarounds are getting bigger.
Thoma Bravo's $5bn Medallia loss and EQT's £10.7bn Intertek acquisition tell the same story from opposite ends. Private equity's software bet has failed. The platform strategy is what comes next.
The proposed takeover highlights how ownership of digital platforms is becoming just as important as ownership of the content itself.
Apollo's co-president warned of a private equity reckoning at SuperReturn in Berlin, then withdrew a £1.5bn bid for Bodycote two days later. The contradiction tells you everything about where the industry stands.
As AI clouds software valuations, private equity is pivoting towards healthcare – a sector whose demand is underpinned by demographics and disease burden that can be forecasted decades ahead.
As Bain and GHO rotate into Japan and healthcare, Astorg cannot raise a fund and JPMorgan quietly offloads NAV loan exposure. The private equity industry is not in a slowdown. It is in a shake-out.
As AI disruption freezes software heavy buyout funds and retail capital retreats, a handful of firms are moving decisively in the opposite direction. The private equity market is splitting into winners and losers in real time.
Buyout activity fell 36 per cent in Q1 2026 as the Gulf conflict and AI disruption to software converge to freeze dealmaking across the private equity industry.
From Blackstone's bid for Senior plc to the largest LBO in history and a regulatory clash threatening the private credit ratings ecosystem, this week laid bare the tensions running through global private capital markets.