Top deals in the economy

The third edition of the Top Deals Yearbook (Top Tranzactii) is published today by Ziarul Financiar and presents the details of the most important 126 deals signed last year and in the first few months of 2009, worth approximately 10 billion euros, a record for the local market. This is an increase of 50% on the volume of 2007, which in turn was a very good year for the mergers and acquisitions market.

The deal ranking would not have shown such an increase without including the partnerships started by the Romanian state with the energy giants to build the thermoelectric power stations in Braila, Galati and Borzesti, as well as reactors three and four of the Cernavoda plant, which amount to almost 6 billion euros together, money that will flow into the economy gradually, though. Excluding such projects, and given the decline in the volume of deals especially in the second half of last year, the volume of mergers and acquisitions has gone down by almost 40%, as a result of the slowdown of the real estate industry first of all and also of the absence of a deal of such magnitude as the Rompetrol-KazMunaiGaz (1.6 billion dollars) transaction. Therefore, real estate is no longer the unquestioned leader of the biggest deals ranking, with the volume of the main transactions going down from almost three billion euros in 2007 to a little more than one billion euros last year, that is in the first part of the year, as deals signed since this autumn have been few and far between and generally opportunistic. Except for real estate and energy projects, a top sector in terms of deals was insurance, with three big transactions (Asiban, BCR Asigurari and Unita) and a cumulated value of 800 million euros, which boosted the profits of the banks that held the companies. Erste, for instance, collected more than 330 million euros.