Reuters – Hostile and unsolicited take-over activity has run rampant lately, and buyers who are getting in on the action may want to draft thank-you notes to their favorite hedge funds for helping tostir the waters.<\/p>\n
Last year was the busiest year since 2001 for unsolicited bids world-wide, and merger experts peg the heavy activity to several factors.<\/p>\n
With the M&A boom now in its middle stages, many of the long talked-about and friendly deals, like Procter & Gamble’s (PG.N: Quote<\/a>, Profile<\/a>, Research<\/a>) acquisition of Gillette, have already closed.<\/p>\n Mergers that span industries or explore new strategies are still largely taboo. But after several years in lock-down mode, corporate chiefs are more aggressively stalking rivals from their own industries that pose “perfect fits.” And the strong debt markets have made that aggression affordable.<\/p>\n The stigma against hostile bids that was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s has also dissipated. There’s even a new set of semantics as take-over offers once called “hostile” are now “unilateral,” and Wall Street’s former “vulture investors” and “corporate raiders” have become known as “activists.”<\/p>\n