Irish companies were involved in over £9 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions in the past year, according to figures compiled by the The Irish Times.
Last year also included the biggest ever merger involving two Irish companies when Irish Life and Irish Permanent agreed terms for a merger that is now valued at close on £2.9 billion.
The scale of that merger might distort the total value of mergers and acquisitions in 1999, but even excluding Irish Life/Irish Permanent, the £6 billion-plus deals represents an impressive level of corporate activity and a bumper year for the country's corporate financiers.
The irony for the corporate financiers was that, because of obvious potential conflicts of interest, they were excluded from the biggest deal of the year - Irish Life and Irish Permanent - where DLJ Phoenix and Schroders are set to scoop the, no doubt, extremely fat fees that the country's biggest ever merger will generate.
Those conflicts of interest have also meant that the Irish corporate finance houses - mostly arms of the big banks - have also been excluded from work on the sale of ICC Bank and the proposed merger of TSB and ACCBank. The sale of a large chunk of Telecom Eireann in a flotation next summer will, however, provide a windfall for AIB Corporate Finance - co-advisers to the Government - on the sale of probably £1 billion worth of Telecom shares.
So much for the corporate financiers. One of the deals of the year has to go to Denis Brosnan for his sure-footedness in putting together a scheme for Kerry to buy Dalgety's food ingredients business for almost £400 million and simultaneously doing a deal with Tomkins to sell the Dalgety flour mills for over £100 million.
Tomkins was so keen to get its hands on the flour mills that it agreed to pay Kerry £108 million without making the deal conditional on getting approval from the Office of Fair Trade (OFT). The OFT duly said no, Tomkins has to sell four of the mills, and Philip Lynch's IAWS is heading the list of prospective buyers. Egg on the face for Tomkins, and no doubt grins of satisfaction in the Tralee boardroom.
Other deal-makers of the year were Don Godson and Harry Sheridan of CRH for the way they snapped up Ibstock from under the noses of rivals. The way CRH, DMG and Cazenove went about their business buying up Ibstock shares that day in December brought back dim and distant memories of Pernod Ricard's outmanoeuvring of Grand Met in the Irish Distillers take-over battle a full 10 years ago.
Last year also saw Donal Geaney's Elan continue its extraordinary level of acquisition, spending over £700 million on three acquisitions in the US. Elan has been able to use its highly-valued shares to fund most of its acquisitions, and that policy is likely to continue. It will be a surprise if Elan does not remain high on the acquisitions list this year, with the group showing no sign of standing still.
The figures for acquisitions by Irish companies would have been over £10 million if the merger between Jefferson Smurfit Corporation and Stone Container was included in the equation. But despite Smurfit's significant involvement in the merger - it will own 33 per cent of the merged Smurfit Stone - this is essentially a merger between two American companies.
Last year also, however, saw some sizeable take-overs of Irish companies and the departure of some High Street household names such as Hayes Conygham & Robinson (bought by Boots) and Team Aer Lingus (eventually bought by FLS after a long and tedious battle with the Team workforce).
A prize for the smaller deal of the year has to go to Mike Enright of Walsh Western who sold his logistics business to NFC for an initial £18 million with the same again in earn-outs.
