Dubai, UAE — Europe has emerged as a global hot spot for mergers and acquisitions in the first half of 2026, as companies across the region pursued deals to sharpen their competitiveness both domestically and globally, according to Bain & Company’s 2026 M&A Midyear Report released Thursday.
Megadeals drove a 77% year-over-year gain across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) through May 31, the consultancy said, as European firms announced transactions spanning domestic consolidation, regional scale-building and global expansion.
Among the standout deals: Orange, Bouygues and Iliad’s $24 billion offer for Altice France, illustrating domestic consolidation; Italy’s UniCredit reviving its approach to Germany’s Commerzbank to build regional scale; and Finland’s Kone launching a $34.4 billion bid for Germany’s TK Elevator, a move combining TK’s U.S. exposure with Kone’s strength in Asia-Pacific.
Broad-based global rebound continues
The regional momentum is part of a broader global resurgence that shows no sign of slowing. After M&A rose 40% to $4.9 trillion in 2025 — the second-highest annual total on record — global deal value climbed a further 41% year-over-year to $2.4 trillion in the first five months of 2026, putting the market on track for its second-best year ever.
Bain said the rebound is grounded in the strategic transformations companies need to compete in a rapidly shifting world, as executives respond to disruptions including the accelerating shift to an AI-driven economy, slowing growth, higher inflation, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — described in the report as the latest manifestation of an emerging post-global order.
Strategic M&A value rose 36% year-to-date even as overall valuations held flat at a median 11.6 times enterprise value/EBITDA, with deal count up just 2%. Energy and natural resources, industrials, and healthcare and life sciences contributed the most growth in absolute deal value.
Financial sponsors had a slower start, with deal value down 9% through May, while venture capital and corporate venture capital deal value surged 206%, powered in part by OpenAI’s latest $122 billion funding round and a 36% rise in deal count.
Megadeals — transactions worth more than $10 billion — grew 52% in number and 53% in value year-over-year. Their funding mix shifted toward a historical high of 35% stock-plus-cash, pushing the share of all-cash deal value to a cyclical low of 55%.
AI creates a “winner’s paradox”
Bain cautioned that acquirers, particularly those pursuing megadeals now dominating the market, face a new “winner’s paradox”: how to pair an ambitious M&A agenda with the AI transformation programs that disruption now demands.
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The great M&A rebound of 2025 was no one-off blip, and the strategic logic driving it has only intensified,” said Suzanne Kumar, executive vice president of Bain’s global M&A practice. She said the AI boom fueling many deals, well beyond the technology sector, is also making it harder than ever to get large, complex transactions right — even as they represent the biggest opportunity for those that do.
AI’s reach extends well beyond tech. The proposed $119 billion merger of U.S. utilities NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy is driven partly by explosive growth in energy-hungry data centers, with the companies pointing to how their combined scale will help finance the power generation needed to meet surging demand.
Bain said large M&A deals often take 36 months or more from announcement to full integration, and that deals above $10 billion take roughly seven months from announcement to close, with another 24 to 36 months needed to realize the bulk of run-rate cost synergies. Rather than waiting, the report argues integration programs should serve as unlocking moments to advance AI-enabled workflow redesign and workforce modernization.
There is a payoff: leading integration programs are using AI to identify and confirm cost-synergy opportunities two to three times faster, and with more ambitious targets, than traditional outside-in diligence suggested.
“Integration has always carried both peril and promise, but the AI overlay is raising the stakes on both sides,” Kumar said. “The companies that win will treat a transaction as the moment to accelerate their AI ambitions.”
Six questions for deal success
Bain’s report poses six questions it says will underpin successful dealmaking going forward:
Do we have a clear view of how AI impacts the deal thesis?
Where can AI provide a faster, no-regrets path to more value creation?
Where can planning for AI today give us more options in the long run?
How should we use this transaction as an unlocking moment for broader transformation?
Are our leaders prepared to support our people through this disruption?
How should the way we manage integration programs evolve?
Companies that address these questions, Bain concludes, are more likely to achieve successful integrations and AI transformations in tandem, rather than find themselves playing by yesterday’s rules for deals.
