Spotlight on Susannah Macknay – What's driving the dealmakers?
Ahead of the Deal - Australian M&A Briefing
This month we're chatting with Susannah Macknay, a partner in our Melbourne corporate transactions team, about trends we're seeing in who's driving deals and where M&A capital is coming from.
Susannah works on market-defining deals across corporate and private equity-driven M&A, for clients such as PAG Private Equity, Cleanaway Waste Management and UniSuper. Susannah is currently advising Diversified United Investment on its merger with Australian United Investment Company to create a merged group with net tangible assets of approximately $3.1 billion.
Q1: Susannah, you've recently worked with Adamantem Capital on its successful acquisition of Apiam Animal Health, and you're advising UniSuper on its participation in the proposed acquisition of Qube by a consortium led by Macquarie Asset Management. What do these and other deals you're seeing tell us about M&A in Australia?
Susannah:
The common thread between these two deals is the bidders – both being 'private capital', which is to say private equity and superannuation funds. That lines up with what we found in our Ashurst M&A Deal Report 2026, which covers acquisitions of Australian ASX listed entities valued over $50 million in 2025. We identified that while the number of such deals involving private capital bidders remained steady (as compared to 2024) at 13, total private capital deal value rose by over 96%, or $5.3 billion, to $10.8 billion. That shows the appetite that private capital has for acquisition opportunities in Australia, and we're seeing that in private M&A as well as public deals. These deals also demonstrate the range of industries that private capital is targeting – both traditional infrastructure assets such as Qube, but also higher growth businesses such as Apiam (which operates in veterinary services).
Q2: On that point, our Ashurst M&A Deal Report 2026's chapter on bidders identifies some other interesting patterns in who's been behind significant public M&A deals in Australia recently. What other notable trends are we seeing there?
Susannah:
One other trend we're seeing with private capital bidders is that they've been very successful in recent Australian public M&A. In the deals we looked at in this year's Report, we saw that private equity bidders in particular had a high likelihood of success once a definitive transaction agreement was signed, with 100% of PE deals succeeding after the bid was agreed, compared with a 76% success rate for non-PE deals.
In terms of where bidders come from, 2025 saw a continued rise in foreign bidder involvement in ASX listed entity transactions, with 25 of 40 deals involving a foreign bidder. There was particularly strong involvement from North American bidders, a trend which we are expecting to continue, given the attractiveness to US bidders of Australian companies across a range of sectors, including technology and critical minerals.
Q3: Speaking of mergers, we recently announced that the Ashurst and Perkins Coie partnerships have approved the combination to form Ashurst Perkins Coie. What's exciting for you about this combination?
For me the most exciting thing is strengthening our ability to serve our clients. Perkins Coie are strongly aligned with Ashurst's relentless focus on client excellence. Here in Australia we've summed up this focus by promising that every interaction we have with our clients will demonstrate that we care, we make it easy and we know what matters. That commitment to putting clients at the centre of everything we do is shared by Perkins Coie, and I'm confident that the combination of our two firms will further enhance our ability to deliver excellent outcomes for our clients wherever they are doing business.
