Is the Deal Market Coming Back?

Scanning the headlines this morning, I thought for a second that I had time-traveled back to 2006. IPOs? Private equity? M&A deals? What gives?

Not that there is a flurry of deals anywhere, including in the food business, but there are more than there have been in months.

Several of the deals involve Asia. For instance, there is actually hard competition in the bidding for Anheuser-Busch InBev's Oriental Brewery unit.

Lotte Group, the South Korean retail giant, is reportedly back in the bidding against a bunch of private equity shops, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, MBK Partners, and Affinity Equity Partners. SABMiller is also rumored to be circling Oriental.

Apparently, Lotte's initial offer in the first round of bidding was too low, so they came back with more. How retro. Still, the initial bids were reportedly at around $1.5 billion, well short of the $2 billion value AB InBev has put on the unit.

And, while the mere fact that offers are being made shows that financing is far looser than it had been, it's not like cash is flowing like water. One person involved in the deal-making told the Financial Times: "It is touch and go whether private equity can get the financing on the terms it requires." The Wall Street Journal reports that bankers are demanding that the private equity players put up as much as half of their offers in the form of equity and the rest in the form of debt. That's way more strict than bankers had ever been before.

AB InBev is also trying to unload other businesses, including the theme parks and other noncore assets that Anheuser Busch owned before InBev took it over last year for $52 billion. That might prove tougher.

Meanwhile, several IPOs are set to price this month. If they go through, the month of April will trounce the entire first quarter's worth of initial offerings, when there was just one: the debut of baby-formula maker Mead Johnson Nutrition.

Mead Johnson's stock was down Thursday during an up day on Wall Street, but it is still trading at about 14 percent above its offering price in February.

That kind of performance might be one reason that Rosetta Stone, Bridgeport Education, and video game maker Changyou.com are going forward with their IPO's. Changyou debuted on the Nasdaq Thursday, pricing at the top end of its offering range of $14 to $16 and was soon trading about 38 percent above that.

On Wednesday, Suntory, a private Japanese beverage maker, announced it had purchased Nagel Beverage, an Idaho Pepsi bottler. Terms weren't disclosed. And the Pepsi Bottling Group said this week it will buy Better Beverages, a Pepsi bottler in Texas.