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This week we honor a retiring colleague. She created the Corporate Deal Tracker Roundup seven years ago and has been the pulse of it since. But rest assured, the CDT Roundup has the usual rundown of the deals reported to us last week, along with names of the firms and lawyers behind them.
Claire Poole, one of the brightest lights in business journalism, is retiring. Her last day is today. For decades, she has written about dealmaking in Texas and beyond with integrity, talent and grit. But the biggest story she's been involved with may well be her own.
Latham & Watkins, Gibson Dunn, Wachtell and McGuireWoods advised on the $2.8 billion merger-of-equals transaction to create Core Natural Resources. The deal combines mining operations across 11 states aimed at global coal exports of metallurgic grade coal.
According to S&P Global, U.S. M&A deal value has declined between election day and year-end in four of the previous seven election cycles. That also means, of course, that in three of those seven cycles, deal value didn't decline. This week the CDT Roundup leans on a recent Morgan Stanley report that suggests that deal-making fundamentals this year are strong enough that the outcome of the upcoming election may not make much difference. Things can change, but with 25 deals reported last week valued at nearly $50 billion, a prediction of robust post-election M&A markets doesn't seem that far off the mark. As always, we have the deals and the names of those who worked on them.
V&E advised Quantum and its portfolio companies QB Energy and Koda Resources while Davis Graham & Stubbs and Latham & Watkins assisted Caerus, which is backed by Oaktree, Anschutz and Old Ironsides.
Carrier Global says the sale to Dallas-based PE Lone Star is part of its continuing divestiture of non-core businesses to refocus as a pure play provider of heating, cooling and solar energy climate-control products.
Kevin Brophy and Ming Lei have worked together on a variety of upstream and midstream deals involving EIV Capital and Houston's Westlawn Group.
If anything defines the last few years in Texas M&A, it's energy consolidation. Big bucks are being dropped to own bigger chunks of the Permian, Gulf Coast LNG production and all the pipeline in between. But the emergence of AI is driving a powerful new influence in the form of digital infrastructure, a sector heavy on the need for energy and real estate — both found in abundance in Texas. The CDT Roundup chatted with Simpson partners Breen Haire and Matt Einbinder on ways in which AI is changing their M&A practice, and it's not what you might think. That, and the usual Roundup breakdown of last week's Texas-related transactions.
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