Global, United States and cross-border M&A hit all-time highs in the first quarter of 2021, with private equity accounting for 19 percent of global deal-making. According to Axios, each category bested all-time Q1 marks as global M&A topped $1.3 trillion.

martinwolf President Tim Mueller has witnessed similar growth trends.

“The M&A market has been growing rapidly. Our martinwolf and ITX teams have experienced sharp increases in M&A activity, with confidence that the second half of 2021 will be even more active,” said Mueller. “For example, IT ExchangeNet doubled in size from 2019 to 2020. And the first quarter for martinwolf is the busiest we been since our founding more than 20 years ago.”

Dan Primack’s article outlines several other notable Q1 M&A growth statistics including that the United States accounted for half of all worldwide transactions while private equity deals reached almost $250 billion.

Mueller previously commented on the unprecedented surge of private equity interest in managed service providers, “Something clicked in May (2020) and we saw a rush of PE firms asking us about MSPs and MSSPs. Our email inbox just started blowing up.”

Read Dan Primack’s full piece on Axios here. If you have questions about what this means for your business, contact Colin Riley (criley@martinwolf.com).