Ich bin nicht Juergen

24 September 2014 By Olaf Storbeck

Be it SAP or Siemens, Merck or Bayer, Germany’s big blue chips are on a foreign buying spree. At $91.5 bln, outbound M&A is up sevenfold on 2013. That’s despite the car crashes of previous mega-deals. Investors are giving a new generation of bosses the benefit of the doubt.

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Four large acquisitions by German companies in the United States since mid-September have pushed the total volume of German outbound M&A to $91.5 billion, Thomson Reuters data show.

On Sept. 15, German automotive supplier ZF Friedrichshafen announced the acquisition of its U.S. peer TRW for $13.5 billion. Four days later, software maker SAP paid $7.4 billion for Concur, a provider of cloud-based travel software.

On Sept. 22, Siemens forked out $7.6 billion for Dresser-Rand, a U.S. maker of oilfield equipment. Merck, the German drugs and chemicals maker, bought life-sciences group Sigma-Aldrich for $17 billion on the same day. In May 2014, German pharmaceuticals group Bayer paid $14.2 billion for the consumer-care business of American peer Merck & Co.

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