Let's make a deal but not right now: Colorado's M&A activity is beginning to rebound but will end the year more than $50 billion off its 2007 peak.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: [top] M&A DEALS

A year to 18 months ago, mergers and acquisitions nationally and in Colorado, too, were in what could be called M&A hell.

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Today, M&A has climbed all the way up to purgatory. Deal heaven, which you will recall occurred right around 2005 to 2007, is not a possibility and for all we know might never be again. But the chance of returning to something like normalcy, today defined as "the year 2004," seems within the market's grasp.

The rules for the last couple of years have been: the larger the deal, the more credit required to make it work to be completed, the lower the chance it could get done; the lesser the deal, the more cash involved, the more likely it was to be completed.

This was because credit had entered the deep freeze and, worse yet, the marketplace was in the state of mind that comes right after panic and might be even worse: sheer dumbfounding, mind-numbing, bone-chilling, white-knuckling, gut-paralyzing fear.

A year back most M&A activity was "focused on the rescue situation, acquisitions of distressed assets and opportunistic acquisitions where strategic buyers feel they can buy assets that are undervalued by the market," Frank Aquila, partner at the New York-based law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, told this reporter in summer 2008. (Dealogic rated Sullivan & Cromwell the No. 1 U.S. M&A law firm, by the way.)

In other words, the vultures were circling, and sometimes swooping.

"The market really soured in 2007, and 2008 was a terrible year," says Mark Coleman, partner with Englewood-based Laurus Transaction Advisors.

This year hasn't been much of a relief. Indeed, 2009 has displayed not all that much M&A activity in Colorado.

According to FactSet Mergerstat LLC, state deal volume peaked in 2007, when it tallied 386 transactions valued at about $60.1 billion. The 2008 volume dropped off the precipice, with 311 M&As worth almost $3.3 billion. This year the picture looks both better and worse, with a mere 187 agreements through the end of October valued at about $3.9 billion.

Or not. Using a different set of criteria, Colorado M&A statistics from Denver-based Green Manning & Bunch Ltd. note a couple of deals that, all by themselves, would substantially swell those numbers. Top of the charts: Liberty Entertainment Inc.'s $12.7 billion merger with DirecTV Group Inc.

(Liberty's busy John Malone has kept Colorado in the M&A game all by himself, with eight transactions in 2009 through...