Belfast law firm Tughans advised on 73 qualifying deals to head up the legal volume table in 2021, with A&L Goodbody (66 deals) and Mills Selig (29) making up the top three.

A&L Goodbody topped the value table with deals worth almost £1.2bn, with Tughans the only other firm to top the £1bn mark last year – both firms having worked on different sides of the Euro Auctions and Learning Pool transactions.

HNH Partners and Grant Thornton each worked on 19 deals in Northern Ireland to top the financial advisory ranking by volume, with KPMG leading the value ranking having worked on transactions with a recorded value of £924m.

Private equity was the funding source in respect of 67 Northern Ireland deals in 2021, representing 28 per cent of the market – a small increase over 2020, where 65 PE-backed deals were announced, although those transactions represented almost 40 per cent of Northern Ireland’s total.

Of 2021’s private equity deals, eight constituted majority buy-outs, while 65 were more earlier stage growth investments; Techstart completed 18 transactions over the year to rank as the country’s most active investment firm by deal volume. Meanwhile, the number of deals funded by new debt was up by 42 per cent year on year; here Danske Bank was the leading funding bank to Northern Ireland M&A, providing funds in support of six transactions.

Experian said in its report that there looks to have been a definite shift in the type of deal carried out in Northern Ireland this year, with strategic buyers and financial investors much more prominent amid a move away from the type of fundraisings that provided a large part of activity in 2020; business confidence is evidently high, and the number of acquisitions and buy-outs doubled (from just 75 in 2020 to 149 last year), while the number of refinancing and rights issue deals declined substantially.

Deal volume was up across all value segments too, with healthy upturns in small and mid-market activity, along with an increase in higher value deals that pushed the total value of Northern Ireland transactions to £1.45bn – more than £1bn above the £415m worth of deals recorded in 2020. There was a Northern Ireland element in approximately 3.5 per cent of all UK transactions by volume so far this year, while Northern Ireland firms contributed around 0.5 per cent of total deal value.