The Deal in Focus: Heads of M&A Survey 2025

27 October 2025: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity is gathering pace in Australia as dealmakers find economic conditions more conducive and focus on their long-term strategies, even as the global environment remains volatile and unpredictable.

That’s according to Deloitte’s annual survey The Deal in Focus: Heads of M&A. Now in its eighth year, the survey captures the views of 100 M&A leaders who are driving the deal resurgence, providing invaluable insights into the state of today’s competitive M&A environment.

The survey also features M&A insights from Deloitte experts across the financial services, consumer and retail, real estate, mining and metals, and power, utilities and renewables sectors.

Key takeaways:

• 75% of survey respondents believe economic conditions support M&A activity
• 65% are confident the economy will recover and thrive in the next 12 months
• 47% believe international uncertainty is affecting their ability to execute deals, a sharp increase from 37% in 2024.

Releasing the survey, Deloitte Australia M&A Transaction Services Partner Jamie Irving said: “After a few years of subdued M&A activity, improving economic conditions have encouraged market momentum. Although international uncertainty lingers, companies are approaching M&A with offensive ambition, aiming to make acquisitions to capture growth and market share.

Navigating economic uncertainty

Lower inflation, easing interest rates, rising real wages and a robust labour market are lifting the domestic outlook and market activity – but M&A leaders are not celebrating just yet. The strength of the economic recovery, the severity of global trade policy and the drag from geopolitical risks are all likely to shape dealmaking conditions in the year ahead.

Nearly half (47%) of respondents stated that international uncertainty is affecting their ability to execute deals, a sharp increase from 37% of respondents in 2024. Domestic uncertainty (42%) and the general pace of economic growth (40%) rank next.

“While last year’s survey showed that respondents were largely preoccupied with the interest rate cycle, international political and economic uncertainty now dominate. Previous concern over supply chain disruption has fallen significantly, with international trade disputes and low growth in several major world economies now dragging on sentiment,” Irving said.

Charting growth

Companies are prioritising offensive M&A growth: more than half (54%) of respondents identified a need to make acquisitions during their most recent portfolio reviews, while 27% identified a need to divest. Overarching motivations included a desire to focus on core business, optimise capital or to prepare for a new future.

“As the economic outlook improves and optimism is building, we’re seeing a rise in offensive M&A ambitions, with organisations looking to capture growth and market share. More than half of those surveyed said they were exploring alternative deal structures as a way of achieving their growth ambitions while mitigating risk,” Irving said.

Meanwhile, ESG and sustainability drivers remain key drivers of deals and longer-term value creation, despite the backlash in some pockets of the investment community. The survey finds that 43% of all respondents saw sustainability as a source of value creation, opportunity or competitive differentiation in a three-to-five-year timeframe.

Narrowing the value gap

As in prior surveys, deal valuation and pricing remains the biggest impediment to M&A success, with 55% of respondents identifying this as their top M&A challenge. However, this was down from 67% in 2024 indicating a narrowing of the bid-ask spread driven by easing inflationary pressures, stabilising base rates and a more resilient economic outlook.

Return expectations remain an enduring challenge to M&A success. The survey found that almost a third of respondents used an equity hurdle rate of more than 15%. Another 57% used 10% to 15% as they priced deals.

Emerging potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in M&A

Dealmaking appears to remain a fairly manual process, with a majority of respondents reporting limited use of digital technologies at each stage of the deal process. The most digitised step was transaction execution, where 45% used some software, the web or AI tools to automate and facilitate the process.

“We believe a sea change is coming, if not already well underway. The more that deal management is digitised, the better placed M&A teams will be to optimise their performance. They’ll be able to assemble models and datasets to better support their decision-making and find better ways to store that information to support future transactions,” Irving said.

Unlocking value in the long term

Acquisition pricing and strong business cases are critical, but the real barrier to deal value is often what happens after signing. Post-announcement transition and integration or separation is where transactions can easily falter and value can be lost.

Over 80% of survey respondents reported that they see the active involvement of C-suite and senior management as essential for achieving deal objectives, yet these leaders are often underutilised in driving change. In considering previous transactions, 59% of respondents identified cultural fit and 57% highlighted employee retention as pressing challenges.

About The Deal in Focus: Heads of M&A

This survey is based on in-depth conversations with 100 M&A leaders from across corporate Australia and forms a key part of Deloitte’s M&A Leadership Series. Around 41% of respondents are from companies listed in Australia and 14% from companies listed overseas. The remaining 45% of companies are privately held and 38% of those are owned by private equity.