Invest In India

The all-share merger deal valued at about Rs 8,500 crore between the two Mukesh Ambani group firms, RIL and RPL, has become probably the 10th-biggest ever for the country and the first billion-dollar deal this year.The shareholders will get one RIL share for every 16 RPL shares – which will result into issuance of 6.92 crore new shares by RIL. This is the only billion-dollar M&A deal announced by an Indian entity so far this year. Prior to this, the biggest M&A deal for the year was Quippo Telecom’s 49 per cent purchase in Tata Tele’s telecom tower arm for 533 milllion dollar.

The biggest-ever deal involving an Indian company so far has been Tata Steel’s mega takeover of European steel major Corus for $12.2 billion, followed by British telecom giant Vodafone’s purchase of controlling stake in Indian mobile service provider Hutch Essar for about $10 billion. So far, M&A deals worth about four billion dollars are estimated to have been announced in 2009 so far, while in 2008 there were deals worth over 30 billion dollars.