The year 2021 is off to an active start. Merger activity increased significantly last week with eight new deals announced, four deals completed and two deals terminated. Two of the eight new deals announced last week were potential deals in the works.
The bidding war for Alaska Communications Systems Group (ALSK) finally came to an end after the company terminated its previous agreement with Macquarie Capital and agreed to be acquired by ATN International (ATNI).
In the ‘weekly spread changes’ table below, there has been a significant change in the weekly spread for Cardtronics (CATM). Cardtronics received an unsolicited proposal from a third party. According to The Wall Street Journal, the new bidder is NCR Corporation (NCR). Another deal that saw a significant change in its spread was Genworth Financial (GNW). The Dec 31, 2020 merger deadline was not extended this time and the stock dropped sharply last Monday. This has been the longest running active deal we have tracked going on more than 4 years at this point. For all intents and purposes the deal is dead but it has not been officially called off and hence remains on our table.
In case you missed it, you can read our 2020 report on U.S. mergers and acquisitions here.
SPAC Arbitrage
We mentioned in our previous post that we have started adding and updating SPACs in our new SPACs tool here. Out of the 29 SPACs announced in the first week of January, there were 13 SPAC IPOs announced on Friday alone raising over $3 billion. We wrote the following in our introduction to SPACs in the January 2021 premium newsletter: