Low tide

摘要

It was going to be a great year for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in 2013. Companies were flush with cash, private equity was chomping at the bit to deploy capital and real interest rates were low. Despite the great expectations among investment banks and analysts, Canadian oil and gas M&A activity ended up totalling a mere $14 billion last year compared to $55 billion in 2012. In fact, by October "we were on track to the lowest amount of new equity in public oil and gas in Canada," says Leslie Kende, managing director of acquisitions and divestitures at AltaCorp Capital Inc. "It was actually going to be a worse year than in 2008."