By Dawn Kopecki and Anousha Sakoui
NEW YORK, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs once again dominated the league tables for global dealmaking in 2025, taking market share and the top spot in a year marked by high-stakes political drama and increasingly bigger mergers.
The rise of the $10 billion deal, of which there were 68 last year totaling $1.5 trillion, more than double the year prior, helped Goldman secure its No. 1 ranking, according to LSEG data. The firm advised on 38 of those deals – more than any
other investment bank – with $1.48 trillion in total volume of deals advised on. It was the strongest period for mega deals, by number, since LSEG records began in 1980.
Calling 2025 an "exceptional M&A year," Goldman's Global Co-Head of M&A Stephan Feldgoise told clients "it was an extraordinary M&A market," with activity driven by a "ubiquity of capital," according to the investment bank's 2026 M&A outlook.
Goldman ranked No. 1 in two key areas: M&A fee revenue and overall value of the deals it worked on, gaining market share in both areas. It was paid $4.6 billion in M&A fees, followed by JPMorgan at $3.1 billion and Morgan Stanley at $3 billion, Citi at $2 billion and Evercore at $1.7 billion, according to LSEG data.
In terms of volume of deals, Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley held the first, second and third spots, respectively, followed by Bank of America and Citi.
For announced M&A with any involvement of Europe, Middle East and Africa, Goldman's market share was 44.7% in 2025, a level only exceeded once before, in 1999, according to LSEG.
Technology drove much of the volume last year, but dealmakers say looser regulatory scrutiny made once-prohibitive deals possible across all sectors. U.S. President Donald Trump's more permissive antitrust oversight gave industry titans the confidence they needed to partner up on the year's biggest deals across railways, consumer products, media and technology.
While Goldman dominated, advising on $1.48 trillion in deals last year, which was 32% of the market, according to LSEG, it wasn't on the top two biggest M&A transactions of the year: railway Union Pacific's $88.2 billion purchase of Norfolk Southern or the heated bidding war for Warner Bros Discovery. Bank of America, Barclays and Wells Fargo and a handful of boutique investment banks also got pieces of those two mega deals as CEOs look to scale up operations.
“The strategic desire to grow and find scale is high, and that has driven boardrooms and C-suites to be more proactive. So people are not waiting for a company to be put up for sale to initiate M&A activity," Anu Ayiengar, JPMorgan's global head of advisory and M&A, said in an interview.
JPMorgan is a leading advisor to Warner Bros in its sale and helped guide Kimberly-Clark with its $50.6 billion purchase of Tylenol maker Kenvue, the bank's two largest deals of the year. JPMorgan was able to beat Goldman as the highest-paid global investment bank after factoring in fees from equities and debt capital markets, raking in $10.1 billion in overall investment banking fees to $8.9 billion for Goldman, according to LSEG.
Paramount Skydance and Netflix's dueling bids for Warner Bros at $108 billion and $99 billion, including debt, helped catapult some banks, boutiques and law firms, including Wells Fargo, Moelis and Allen & Co, as well as law firm Latham and Watkins up the list for M&A. Wells, which advised on ten $10 billion-plus deals, including Netflix's bid for WBD, leapfrogged eight slots from 2024 to No. 9.
Boutique bank Moelis, which also advised Netflix, hopped three notches ahead to finish out 2025 at No. 16. It was on five deals worth more than $5 billion apiece, including the $20 billion sale of Essential Utilities.
Whether they stay at their current rankings could depend on who wins the Warner Bros bid. Right now, advisors for both bidders are getting credit in the rankings, but that will change once Warner Bros chooses a winner, according to data provider LSEG. RedBird Capital Partners and M. Klein & Co., which didn't make the top 120 last year, are contenders in the top 25 this year thanks to their work for Paramount.
That is the only deal the two boutiques are getting credit for in the league tables, LSEG said, and the Warner Bros board is leaning toward rejecting Paramount's latest offer, people familiar with the board's thinking told Reuters previously. If Paramount withdraws its offer, Wells stands to gain two more spots in the rankings while Paramount's M&A team would lose theirs, the data shows.
Charles Ruck, the global chair of the corporate department at LSEG's No. 1 ranked M&A legal advisor Latham & Watkins, attributed the rising number of large deals to "size creep." The S&P 500 rose 16.39% last year and the Nasdaq finished 20.36% higher, making deals all that more expensive this year. Latham advised on the Paramount offer, the $55 billion leveraged buyout of video game maker Electronic Arts and on the $40 billion sale of Aligned Data Centers. And the market is even more ripe for more consolidation now, he said.
"The pipeline is full," he said in an interview. "All of the macro indicia are there, right? Interest rates are coming down, which makes it easier for our private equity clients to do deals and make their targeted returns. There is a lot of cash on balance sheets of corporate America, the IPO market is still not as robust anybody would hope, which means M&A for exits. And you've got a basically friendly regulatory environment navigating the winners and losers."
(Reporting by Dawn Kopecki and Anousha Sakoui, Editing by Nick Zieminski)
