Merger activity increased last week with seven new deals announced and four deals completed. In keeping with what we have been seeing for several weeks, two of these seven new deals were banking related mergers.
There were a total of 24 deals announced in the month of April for a total deal value of over $114 billion. Looking back one year, we had only 2 deals announced in April 2020, which was the lowest deal volume we had seen in a decade. Four of the seven deals announced last week were multi-billion dollar deals.
Founded in 1854 and headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, W. R. Grace (GRA) is a global specialty chemical company, that operates through two business segments—Catalysts Technologies and Materials Technologies. We added W. R. Grace as a potential deal in the works on November 9, 2020, when it received a proposal from 40 North Management LLC, one of its shareholders, to acquire all outstanding common shares of the Company for $60 per share in cash. On January 11, 2021, 40 North Management increased its offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of common stock of GRA for $65 per share in cash and further increased the offer to $70 on April 1, 2021. On April 26, 2021, W. R. Grace entered into a definitive agreement under which Standard Industries Holdings will acquire Grace in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $7.0 billion, including Grace’s pending pharma fine chemistry acquisition. 40 North is a “related investment” business of Standard Industries. The $70 purchase price represents a premium of approximately 59% over Grace’s closing stock price of $44.05 on November 6, 2020, the last trading day prior to the announcement of 40 North’s initial proposal to acquire the Company on November 9, 2020.
You can find all the active deals listed below in our Merger Arbitrage Tool (MAT) that automatically updates itself during market hours.
There were no new deals announced in the Deals in the Works section last week.