India Inc's M&A deals gallop seven-fold to $34.8 billion in Q1

New Delhi: Corporate India announced merger and acquisition (M&A) deals worth $34.8 billion during April-June this year, registering nearly 7 fold jump over the same period last year, says an EY report.

According to EY's latest Transaction Quarterly, the reported period recorded highest quarterly deal value at $34.8 billion across 273 deals in India.

While deal volume rose 19 per cent year-on-year, the disclosed deal value was 6.8 times of the $5.1 billion reported in April-June 2017.

The uptrend can be attributed to the six big ticket deals (worth over $1 billion) in the reported quarter, the report said.

The biggest deal in June quarter 2018 was the $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart by Walmart Inc, which accounted for 46 per cent of the total disclosed deal value, EY said.

"M&A activity is expected to stay positive in the coming quarters, on the back of continued interest of financial and strategic investors in the Indian market," said Amit Khandelwal, Managing Partner, Transaction Advisory Services, EY.

Domestic activity is expected to strengthen further as players across sectors look to expand scale, de-leverage balance sheets and innovate their offerings through increased usage of new technologies.

Moreover, restructuring of deals will also remain active as NPA cleaning is a high priority for banks, Khandelwal added.

From sectoral perspective, financial services with 39 pacts worth $1.1 billion recorded the highest number of deals and consumer products and retail (30 deals; $16.5 billion) dominated in terms of deal value.

Telecom (2 deals; $5.4 billion), diversified industrial products (23 deals; $2.9 billion) and metals and mining (6 deals; $960 million) were also in the limelight as they clocked substantially high deal value, EY added.