Europe’s Biggest M&A Deals of 2026

LONDON, 24 August 2026 — EBM NEWSDESK ANALYSIS By Nick Staunton

From Unilever’s $65bn food combination to Kone’s audacious takeover of TK Elevator and America’s continuing raid on undervalued British assets, Europe is experiencing its strongest dealmaking cycle in years. The largest transactions reveal something deeper than a revival in animal spirits: companies are buying scale because they increasingly believe remaining mid-sized is the greater risk.

European boardrooms are doing deals again. Mergers and acquisitions across Europe, the Middle East and Africa reached $676bn during the first half of 2026, more than double the comparable level a year earlier and the strongest first-half performance in 19 years, according to LSEG data. Britain has been the particular outlier: by late June, offers for UK companies had already exceeded $231bn, up 210 per cent year-on-year. Cheap London valuations have helped, but this is not simply bargain hunting. Food, financial services, elevators, logistics property, airlines and industrial testing are all consolidating for different versions of the same reason — the economics of being bigger have become harder to ignore.

It is the acceleration of a trend EBM identified earlier this year in Europe’s biggest dealmaking boom in a decade. What looked like a burst of transactions in February has become a broader restructuring of European corporate ownership.

Unilever and McCormick: a $65bn reshaping of global food

The largest European-linked transaction of the year is also one of the biggest food deals ever attempted. Unilever is combining much of its food business with US spice and condiments group McCormick to create a company valued at roughly $65bn. Unilever’s contributed food assets — including brands such as Hellmann’s and Knorr — are valued at about $44.8bn including debt, while Unilever will initially retain a 9.9 per cent interest in the combined business. The transaction effectively accelerates chief executive Fernando Fernandez’s attempt to turn Unilever into a more focused beauty, personal-care and household-products company.

The size masks an uncomfortable strategic truth. Unilever’s foods division remains highly profitable, with a 22.6 per cent underlying operating margin, but growth has been slower than elsewhere in the group. Developed-market packaged food is under pressure from private labels, changing eating habits and increasingly sceptical consumers. McCormick, meanwhile, gets a collection of globally recognised brands it could never replicate organically. The deal is therefore less a distressed disposal than an enormous portfolio trade: Unilever is exchanging mature food assets for strategic focus, while McCormick is betting that scale can revive their growth.

Italy’s €70bn banking chessboard

Europe’s most complicated M&A battle is taking place in Italian banking. Intesa Sanpaolo has launched a cash-and-shares offer for Monte dei Paschi di Siena worth around €34.5bn, only for MPS to respond in August with separate all-share offers valuing Banco BPM at €25.3bn and Banca Generali at €8.7bn. Taken together, the competing transactions put roughly €70bn of potential deal value into play across a handful of institutions.

The extraordinary element is MPS itself. Less than a decade ago it required a state bailout; it has since returned to private ownership, acquired Mediobanca and become one of the principal actors in Italian consolidation. Its latest defensive strategy is designed to create Italy’s third major banking group rather than allow Intesa to absorb and partially break it up. It is precisely the type of consolidation EBM examined in the rise of the European champion M&A deal: national governments increasingly want banks large enough to compete across the continent, even if the politics of cross-border combinations remain difficult.

Kone and TK Elevator: Europe builds an industrial champion

Finland’s Kone has agreed to acquire Germany’s TK Elevator in a transaction worth €29.4bn, or about $34.4bn, including debt. If completed, the combination would create the world’s largest elevator manufacturer, with more than 100,000 employees and annual sales above €20bn. It would also represent the biggest private-equity exit in Europe since LSEG records began in 1980, providing Advent International and Cinven with the culmination of an investment first made when they bought TKE from Thyssenkrupp in 2020.

The industrial logic is unusually clear. Kone is strong in Europe and Asia; TKE brings greater exposure to North America. Both companies increasingly depend on maintenance and modernisation rather than simply installing lifts in new buildings, particularly as China’s property downturn reduces new-construction demand. Kone expects roughly €700mn of annual cost savings, although competition authorities will scrutinise a combination in an already concentrated industry. It is also a useful test of whether Brussels’ promised rethink of merger policy — explored by EBM in Europe’s biggest merger-rule overhaul in two decades — really makes it easier to create globally competitive European companies.

Prologis and Segro: $19bn for Europe’s warehouses

US logistics-property giant Prologis finally secured the board of Britain’s Segro in August with an offer worth up to £14.3bn, or roughly $19.2bn, after multiple earlier approaches were rejected. Segro owns around 10.9mn square metres of warehouses and logistics space across Europe, giving Prologis instant scale in some of the continent’s most difficult-to-replicate industrial locations. The agreed price represented a substantial premium to Segro’s pre-bid valuation and ranks among the largest foreign takeovers of a London-listed company.

Yet warehouses explain only part of the price. Segro also has a growing data-centre development pipeline. The overlap between logistics real estate, grid access and AI infrastructure has made strategically located land far more valuable than conventional property multiples suggest. For Prologis, buying an existing European platform may ultimately be cheaper and faster than competing parcel by parcel for suitable sites.

Nuveen ends 222 years of Schroders independence

Few deals better illustrate the pressure on Europe’s middle-sized financial institutions than Nuveen’s £9.9bn ($13.5bn) takeover of Schroders. The transaction ends more than two centuries of independence for one of Britain’s best-known financial houses and creates a combined manager with around $2.5tn of assets. Schroders’ founding family, which owns approximately 41 per cent, agreed to sell as part of the transaction.

The underlying problem is scale. Active fund managers face relentless fee pressure from BlackRock, Vanguard and passive investment products while simultaneously having to spend more on technology, distribution and alternative assets. The economics increasingly punish firms caught between global giants and specialised boutiques. EBM examined the broader advisory and consolidation cycle in its analysis of Goldman Sachs and the new M&A supercycle. Schroders may prove less an exception than a template.

Private equity keeps circling London

Swedish private-equity group EQT’s £9.4bn ($12.7bn) takeover of testing and certification group Intertek adds another large British company to the 2026 deal tally. The transaction followed repeated bids and pressure from shareholders who believed Intertek’s public-market valuation failed to reflect the quality of its business. Apollo Global’s £5.7bn ($7.7bn) agreement to buy easyJet tells a similar story from a very different industry. Apollo ultimately outbid Castlelake after months of manoeuvring around an airline that had previously rejected approaches as opportunistic.

The easyJet contest, covered by EBM in Apollo’s battle for the airline, crystallises the question hanging over London markets. If global investors consistently believe British companies are worth substantially more than their quoted share prices imply, foreign acquisitions become less an occasional event than a mechanism for correcting valuations.

Europe’s new corporate map

There is no single explanation for the M&A boom. Lower relative European valuations attract American capital; private-equity firms need exits; technology and regulatory costs reward scale; and European policymakers are increasingly uncomfortable with the continent’s fragmented corporate structure. But the largest transactions share a common assumption: standing still is becoming expensive.

For Unilever, that means abandoning part of its historical identity. For Kone, it means attempting to build a global industrial leader. For Italian banks, it means deciding who consolidates whom before somebody else makes the decision. And for Britain, it increasingly means asking why some of its best-known companies appear more valuable to overseas buyers than to its own public markets.

Europe’s deal boom is therefore not simply about companies changing hands.

It is about the corporate map of the continent being redrawn — one multibillion-euro transaction at a time.