Global dealmaking entered 2026 echoing the narrowing breadth of the stock market: fewer transactions, but bigger checks.
M&A values rose in the first quarter ($319 billion versus $283 billion in the first quarter of 2025), despite deal volumes falling to their lowest level in several years, the latest report from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows. The data make the quarter look less like a broad recovery and more like a selective market in which companies pursue only the best deals.
The result is a multi-speed M&A cycle. Financing costs, geopolitical risks, and macroeconomic uncertainty continue to pressure smaller and mid-market deals. Meanwhile, large strategic capital continues to move, primarily into critical commodities, energy assets, and infrastructure-heavy technologies.
Metals And Mining: Buyers Chase Scale
Metals and mining delivered one of the clearest signs of that shift.
Total deal value in the sector jumped 63% quarter-over-quarter to $26.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, the second-largest quarterly total since S&P began tracking the data in late 2013. Buyers were not simply buying optionality. They were buying scale, operating assets, and strategic exposure to commodities considered central to long-term supply chains.
Corporate-level transactions led the quarter, with 30 deals worth $22.93 billion. Meanwhile, asset purchases totaled only $3.35 billion across 16 deals.
The gap shows how the market currently prefers platform consolidation over individual asset accumulation.
The largest named transaction was the proposed $10.03 billion acquisition of Bluescope Steel, Ltd. (OTC: BLSFF) by SGH Ltd. (OTC: SVNWF) and Steel Dynamics, Inc. (STLD), while named gold-linked transactions included the $1.29 billion pending sale of the producing Copler mine and related properties and Zijin Gold International Co. Ltd. (OTC: ZJNGF) $1.46 billion acquisition of a stake in Chifeng Jilong Gold Mining.
Oil And Gas Consolidation Turns Selective
Oil and gas showed the same value-over-volume pattern.
Whole-company and minority-stake transactions dropped to just 58 in the first quarter, down from 91 a year earlier and 80 in the prior quarter. Yet total transaction value rose to $41.13 billion, topping both first-quarter 2025's $38.61 billion and fourth-quarter 2025's $30.12 billion.
Geopolitics helps explain the urgency. Oil prices surged in March, as the war in the Middle East effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a major shipping route.
That environment widened the divide between strong and weak assets. Well-capitalized buyers used consolidation to improve portfolios, secure cash-flowing assets, and cut costs. Marginal assets, meanwhile, struggled to transact.
Thus, energy M&A is no longer about expansion for expansion's sake. It shifted to defensive positioning, balance-sheet strength, and control over assets that can still perform in a volatile commodity cycle.
