Bill Griffeth (Anchor) 00:00.350
but what other kind of companies and industries may also be at play let's talk about it with vito sperduto he is the head of RBC capital markets US global head co global head of M and A vito great to have you on thanks for having
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 00:13.590
me so
Bill Griffeth (Anchor) 00:14.070
what is the the deal making setup heading into twenty twenty six sure
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 00:19.950
look if i look back a year ago we thought the first half was going to be a little slower just as people got used to the administration and the new policies and that's what played out and then the second half of the year we expected a fair amount of activity it certainly has
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 00:33.070
exceeded what our expectations were coming year but if you think about the US i i call it a great acceleration that just happened in twenty five we are basically flat in the first quarter and then ended up about up fifty nine percent yes it was driven by large scale mega deals
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 00:50.710
but all sectors participated i think what we're seeing now is that people have kind of worked through the deals that were in the pipeline and we're starting to see new activity
Bill Griffeth (Anchor) 01:00.630
how is that activity is it strong is it mid level where where do we stand with you know the churning ahead of the possible deals
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 01:07.950
yeah i i think the the activity level is across the board in terms of sizes certainly TMT health care life sciences are leading the way financial services after that i think everybody 's focused on them and you just talked about the alphabet transaction right they were an
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 01:25.310
investor in the company ahead of the acquisition they are are clearly buying greater capacity and energy resilience and if you think about the AI play it's no longer about the technology and necessarily the availability of capital because there's plenty there it's really the
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 01:43.760
energy constraint as you just showed from that chart which illustrates it perfectly and so folks are trying to buy that greater capacity greater diversity of energy production and certainly that's a big play for the sort of the AI centric opportunities and then when you look at
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 02:01.030
the other sectors you've always got the healthcare companies looking at patent cliffs and trying to figure out how do i continue to diversify my pipeline add to it and build to it you're starting to see the healthcare companies reacting to how the government is changing some of
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 02:17.070
the policy and you know they're they're fairly resilient and they're going to get there yeah
Kelly Evans (Anchor) 02:22.630
i think that you know it was actually a surprisingly busy year this past year we just didn't have a lot of those high profile big deals and then of course along came the WD one at year end to kind of just put it put a banner on things so it sounds like it it should be pretty
Kelly Evans (Anchor) 02:35.710
busy and do we get finally this IPO wave where it's like OK we move from just the private equity backed exits to the ones that are a little bit more in these hot spots like AI you're mentioning i
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 02:44.950
i think there's incredible thirst for the IPO environment to to continue to grow if you look at it december this month is going to be equal to what we had in september which are the two largest volume IPO months of the year but over seven billion of the volume this month is from
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 03:02.070
medline which is about eight point six so seven out of eight point six and you can tell so i think going into the year there's a fair amount of companies on the sidelines waiting to access the markets and we're looking at some very notable large scale situations but that just
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 03:17.190
improves the environment because again it's just another opportunity for them to have a different exit alternate what are
Bill Griffeth (Anchor) 03:22.670
they waiting for
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 03:25.540
i i think the it's become easier to stay private longer and so it's really making that decision to access the markets and do i want to put myself out there in terms of the volatility that i'm going to experience the size of the companies that are going public has gotten bigger
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 03:44.320
it's you know what we used to experience like i've been doing this for thirty five years what we had you know ten twenty thirty years ago in terms of what made sense to go public is certainly not the same scale that you need today i mean today you need a much larger scale to get
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 03:58.070
public and i think private capital and and the sort of ease of staying private and having more liquidity alternatives has made it a longer timeline but you're you know certainly we're going to see if i think a fairly robust IPO calendar going into next year and and if we look at
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 04:15.630
the private equity portfolios there's a lot of assets in those portfolios that need to be monetized as we think about the lifespan of those companies pursuing all sorts of alternatives beyond just the specific sale of the companies i think the IPO market is going to provide them
Vito Sperduto (Head of RBC Capital Markets U.S.) 04:31.670
another opportunity