Dealmaking cooled during the first month of 2025 despite optimism around what US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House meant for merger and acquisition (M&A) prospects.
Thomas H. Lee Partners co-CEO Scott Sperling tells Morning Brief Co-Hosts Seana Smith and Brad Smith he maintains a positive outlook for M&A in 2025. Sperling credits the few deals in January to two things: the transition to the Trump administration and the combination of uncertainty and high valuations stifling M&A.
“We’re coming out of a regulatory environment that basically prohibited any kind of significant combinations that would make strong economic sense for consumers and, in fact, for the industry itself,” Sperling says.
“We had an [Federal Trade Commission] FTC that was clearly off the reservation in terms of their interpretation of what their powers and authorities were. We’re now moving into something, I think, that’s more rational in that sense. So, I think that there’s more opportunity to actually effectuate interesting mergers and acquisitions than we were able to do under the last administration,” he adds.
Sperling emphasizes that investors have withstood “a world” with an “unusual combination” of economic and global uncertainties: “That in and of itself may have muted some of the financial returns that would be possible from certain types of M&A and certain types of deal doing.”
Ultimately, the M&A landscape will be “more encouraged as we go forward over the next 12 months that there will be more opportunities to see significant acquisitions on the part of strategics and the ability for private equity to again ramp up the volume of what it does,” the co-CEO tells Yahoo Finance.
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