Related Expertise: Mergers and Acquisitions, Business Strategy

M&A Activity by Year: Collected Reports

BCG has published a mergers and acquisitions report—covering M&A activity by year, the current state of the M&A market, and perspectives on deal-making trends—annually since 2003. Explore the full series, including the latest BCG M&A report, here.

For many companies, creating value from mergers and acquisitions has been an elusive goal. BCG has long studied M&A activity to understand evolving trends and what the activity means for value creation in the short and long terms.

Since 2003, our annual M&A report has presented analyses of buy-side and sell-side transactions based on our BCG M&A database, now comprising more than 840,000 deals dating back to 1980. This year’s report examines the issues of ESG in M&A, sustainability, and how companies can use green M&A to advance their environmental agendas. Collectively, our M&A reports offer a longitudinal view of the market’s evolution and how successful dealmakers create value.

Explore Green M&A Activity by Year

The dashboard allows you to study environmentally motivated M&A activity. Explore green M&A by industry, region, time frame, and deal value. See how these deals have grown—especially in the past decade—driven by the power and utilities industry and companies in different regions across the globe. Also, see all M&A activity by year in our comprehensive M&A analysis. The bottom line: Companies that do not use M&A as a primary tool to achieve their environmental goals may be missing out on significant value-creation opportunities.

The 2022 M&A Report: All Lights Green for M&A

In four chapters, BCG's M&A experts explore current M&A activity and reveal how successful dealmakers create value in an era of ESG-related deals.

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The 2022 M&A Report: Dealmaking Remains Active as Dark Clouds Form

Corporate and financial acquirers are pursuing M&A targets more cautiously, but they have not closed shop.

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The 2022 M&A Report: Green Deals Gain Steam

Environmentally focused M&A activity has heated up over the past few years, intensifying competition and driving up prices.

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The 2022 M&A Report: Do Green Deals Create Value?

Many acquirers are generating short- and long-term returns from environmentally focused M&A, but others are struggling to succeed.

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The 2022 M&A Report: The Winning Moves in Green Dealmaking

By applying the lessons learned from success stories, companies can use M&A and other transactions to accelerate their environmental transformations.

Explore BCG’s Past M&A Reports

Since our first annual M&A report in 2003, we have complemented our analyses of M&A activity and trends with strategic insights into how companies can create value from mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. The reports have covered a broad range of macroeconomic environments and industry perspectives, focusing on both traditional and alternative deal types. Across the reports, our analyses pinpoint what infrequent dealmakers can learn from their more experienced counterparts’ successful approaches.

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The 2021 M&A Report: Mastering the Art of Breaking Up

Many companies are eyeing divestitures in the current environment. Are they likely to create value? What is the best path to success?

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The 2020 M&A Report: Alternative Deals Gain Traction

Companies are increasingly turning to innovative approaches to corporate collaboration to meet the challenges of the current crisis and adapt to disruptive megatrends.

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The 2019 M&A Report: How to Master M&A in a Downturn

Success requires careful preparation, thorough execution, and, especially, bold decision making in uncertain times.

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The 2018 M&A Report: Synergies Take Center Stage

Dealmakers seeking to convince their board and shareholders that an acquisition creates value have a clear imperative: prove that synergies justify a high valuation.

View the M&A Report Archive

The authors of our annual mergers & acquisitions reports examine M&A activity to spotlight trends and opportunities. Meet some of our ESG in M&A experts.

See more M&A experts

How We Track M&A Activity by Year

During the first nine months of 2022, BCG’s Transaction Center conducted the research that underpins BCG’s 2022 M&A Report.

Data Sets

Defining ESG and Environmental M&A Transactions

Our review of the definitions of ESG and sustainability indicates that they have similar meanings and tend to be used interchangeably. BCG defines sustainability as “an organization's delivery of value in financial, environmental, social, and governance terms to itself, its stakeholders, and society at large, in the short and the long term.”

To identify ESG M&A activities, we developed a dictionary of 591 ESG terms (for example, carbon capture within the environmental component of ESG, occupational health within the social component, and board diversity within the governance component). The terms reflect usage in existing ESG frameworks (such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the European Union’s taxonomy for sustainable activities), banks’ and investors’ definitions of ESG investing, and academic research. In addition, we adopted Refinitiv’s classification of sustainable finance when defining environmental deals, and we included health care and education in the definition of social deals; the latter follows the approach that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals uses. We applied this dictionary to screen the “target business description,” “deal synopsis,” and other relevant data fields available from data providers.

In total, the initial deal sample for this year’s analyses included 151,604 ESG M&A transactions, of which 38,968 are environmental M&A transactions (the report refers to these as “green deals”). We excluded transactions marked as self-tenders, recapitalizations, exchange offers, repurchases, privatizations, and spinoffs, and we focused on the period from 2001 through 2021. This yielded a final sample of 119,201 ESG transactions and 32,766 environmental transactions. Depending on the analysis, the sample size varies as a result of additional data requirements.