One Million & Counting: 38 Years of Mergers and Acquisitions

History was made in January when Thomson Reuters entered the 1,000,000th deal into our industry-leading M&A database - a $154 million real estate transaction. A big deal, to say the least.

In fact, the Thomson Reuters Deals Database had never seen greater attention or interest from the public during a record-breaking year for deal making. The industry trusted Thomson Reuters to be at the heart of it. The New York Times, Reuters, the FT and CNBC, among others, categorised 2015 as the year of blockbuster deals, with colossal companies seeking greater behemoth status – and we kept track of it all.   

Think about the sheer impact this information has had on the financial industry

Every M&A deal was captured by scouring thousands of news wires, public filings, press articles, and other sources daily. And it didn’t stop there: highly trained production professionals analysed each deal by applying our market-tested valuation and categorization methodologies, and then propagated the transactions to the Thomson Reuters Deals Database.

But this isn’t new. And we aren’t celebrating the milestone alone.

Thomson Reuters has provided complete coverage of global M&A activity since 1978, and tens of thousands of professionals have used this information throughout the years to make informed, strategic and highly impactful business decisions on both regional and global scales.

Think about the sheer impact this information has had on the financial industry. Now imagine how much more insight can be derived from analysing 30 years’ worth of M&A data, whilst knowing the impact those deals have had on the industry in the past 30 years.

The Thomson Reuters Deals Database is not just a data hub: it’s a platform

This mine of information is a tremendous asset to have in the 21st century. In the age of big data, the pace of innovation across the world is driven by analytics tools’ capabilities as they separate the signal (i.e. the insight) from the noise (i.e. the plethora of data). How fast data is collected, processed and analysed is what makes it valuable. It enables customers to use data in ways not possible before.

The Thomson Reuters Deals Database is not just a data hub: it’s a platform whose value stems from the insight that can be extracted from it. In this specific case – and many others – Thomson Reuters has the tools to do so.

Now it comes down to using these tools to find trusted answers.