Jen Hughes

Hey there.

Well, there's been two that sort of caught our eye.

First was for Tate & Lyle, the ingredients group.

Everyone thinks of that one as a sugar company, but it's not these days.

They've had a £2.7 billion approach, and this is from a fellow ingredients company called Ingredian, which is a US mid-cap and sort of in the same industry.

Now, they're in talks at the moment.

The second was Spire Healthcare.

It's a private hospital operator, and someone's approached it with second largest shareholder, offering almost a billion pounds.

They've yet to make a firm offer, but that one looks like quite a positive development as well.

Well, mid-caps are always an interesting space because they're companies on their way down.

You might say Tate and Lyle, once a FTSE 100 company is one of those.

And those on their way up, the up and coming companies, the next big blue chips.

So for M&A though, for mergers and acquisitions, mid-cap is really the engine of that market.

They're easier for other companies to buy, to digest, attracted to private equity as well.

And you often get a lot of strategic buyers in the same industry.

Blue chips are the real headline deals.

That's like the multi, multi, multi billion, billion pound deals.

But the mid-caps are what keeps that market going.

Well, the problem for the UK mid-caps is that that sort of sector is often much more domestic, whereas blue chips are much more international.

So the problem is that the UK has had quite a few years now of very lacklustre productivity growth, not particularly great economic growth and a lot of political grumbling about all of this.