BDO Horizons 2025 - Issue 3

Original content provided by BDO
Welcome to the summer edition of Horizons in 2025, our regional analysis written by BDO M&A professionals from around the world. The overall global data shows a decline on deal activity in the first half of 2025, a drop of around 14%, compared with the second half of 2024. This year has been dominated so far by the speculation and realities of the impact of US trade tariffs. Private equity has held dealmaking activity much better than trade and, with all data taken into account, this period would have looked significantly worse without the private equity contribution. The heat chart still shows that the expected level of transactions is considerably down if compared to the last few years of data. However, pipelines in the mid-market where we operate, are still healthy. The reality is that both private equity and trade buyers have ample resources to invest and once the dust settles down on the tariffs front, we would expect deal activity to improve.