reply Big-money international giants are on a buying spree

On December 20, Oracle announced that it would buy Cerner, an electronic medical records company, for $95 a share in cash, or $28.3 billion. The deal is expected to close in 2022.BNP Paribas, France's biggest bank, said it had agreed to sell its American arm, Bank of the West, to Canada's BMO Financial Group for about $16.3 billion.IGO Ltd, an Australian nickel and lithium miner, is buying rival Western Areas in an all-cash deal valued at A $1.1 billion. This marks the beginning of a consolidation trend for nickel assets in Western Australia.Mergers and acquisitions have been a lot in the news lately. Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn, some companies have seen their profits decline and even gone bankrupt due to the epidemic and poor management. As of August, 1,860 companies across Japan have gone bankrupt due to COVID-19 since February last year, according to data from Imperial Data Bank, a credit checking company. Being acquired by a peer or upstream company is the least bad way out. Separately, the number of global corporate bankruptcies is expected to rise significantly in 2022 as governments wind down the support measures that helped companies stay afloat during the pandemic, according to a new report from Trade credit insurer Euler Hermes.For troubled companies, accepting a merger may be inevitable. For other competitive companies looking to bridge skills, resources and technology gaps as quickly as possible, mergers and acquisitions can be the fastest and most efficient way. Moreover, due to the extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies of most governments, many high-quality enterprises have abundant working capital. Now is a good time to acquire competitors and upstream and downstream enterprises, and we can set out a development road of constant strength through acquisition. For example, South Korea's Samsung Group, with a cash pile of more than $100 billion, is aggressively pushing ahead with its stated goal of "launching meaningful mergers and acquisitions within three years" to achieve its previous goal of "becoming the world's number one foundry by 2030". Samsung's acquisition plan is to acquire one or a number of international semiconductor giants, including Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP, Infineon, Stmicroelectronics and other companies.According to statistics, many American companies have the most cash reserves. To prepare for a rainy day, many companies have bolstered their cash reserves. Carnival Corp, the US cruise operator, currently holds about $9bn in cash, compared with about $2bn to $2.5bn typically before the pandemic. United Airlines Holdings held $23 billion in cash, more than four times as much as at the same time in 2019. Apple is in first place with $204.37 billion in cash, while Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is second with $160 billion. Global M&A activity broke a record in 2021 as cash-rich companies increasingly showed their m&a ambitions and actions amid the global economic downturn, with a flood of capital and sky-high valuations fuelling frenzied deal prices. The value of global mergers and acquisitions has topped $5tn for the first time ever, according to global data processing firm Dilokee. Global m&a volumes rose 63 per cent to $5.63tn in the year to December 16, easily surpassing the previous record of $4.42tn set before the 2008 financial crisis. It has also been an active year for European private equity firms, which are snapping up U.S. companies at the fastest pace since the financial crisis and hiring more locally to expand across the Atlantic. By August, European buy-out funds were involved in more than $83bn of US deals, driven by large acquisitions by private equity firms such as Sweden's EQT AB and France's PAI Partners.China's M&A market is not to be sniffed at. Data show that by the end of September this year, mergers and acquisitions in China's pharmaceutical and biological industry have exceeded more than 100 orders. Since the second half of the year, mergers and acquisitions in China's domestic pharmaceutical industry are still active, including Buchang Pharmaceutical, Broad Pharmaceutical and a large number of enterprises have also issued mergers and acquisitions announcements. In addition, China is expected to see a wave of real estate mergers and acquisitions next year. Recently, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBRC) jointly issued a notice to encourage banking financial institutions to provide financial support and services for mergers and acquisitions of risk disposal projects of key real estate enterprises. The notice points out that in terms of increasing bond financing support, it clearly supports high-quality real estate enterprises to register and issue debt financing instruments in the interbank market, raise funds for mergers and acquisitions of risk disposal projects of key real estate enterprises, and actively provide financing advisory services for mergers and acquisitions. At that time, the operation of stable leading housing enterprises and state-owned enterprises will be the "main force" of m&a.Superposition of epidemic continues, most countries market interest rates at historically low levels, global not directly impacted by the outbreak of the company holding more than $7.6 trillion in cash and marketable securities, are eyeing gaze in the market for m&a object, like animals on the African savannah, in the sun rises every day, in the fierce competition for survival.