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October 2026 | Top M&A deals

  • EMIS
  • 2 min read

Eastern Europe

Schneider Electric is offering EUR 70 per share for Bulgarian smart-home device maker Shelly Group, valuing the company at roughly EUR 1.2bn. Shelly’s co-founders, who together hold about 57% of shares, have conditionally agreed to sell and the company’s board has backed the offer. Shelly, which offers smart plugs, meters, locks and cameras alongside cloud services, has grown its revenue by more than 40% per year since 2022. deal pushes Schneider deeper into connected-home technology, pairing Shelly’s IoT and home-energy-management platform with Schneider’s existing buildings business. Shelly’s headquarters, workforce and R&D functions are set to stay in Bulgaria. Closing is expected by Q1 2027, pending Bulgarian regulatory approval.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Brazilian medical-education group Afya is merging into Yduqs Participações, a broader higher-education platform, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly USD 1.9bn. Yduqs will become the holding company for the combined group, with Afya’s Nasdaq-listed shares delisted and the combined entity trading solely on Brazil’s B3 exchange. Under the exchange ratio, Afya shareholders will hold 69% of the combined company and Yduqs shareholders 31% – leaving Bertelsmann, Yduqs’s largest backer, with 47.4% overall. The deal brings together Afya’s medical-school pipeline with Yduqs’s wider portfolio of institutions, creating one of Brazil’s largest higher-education groups. Closing is subject to shareholder and antitrust approval in Brazil.

Emerging Asia

Grab Holdings is buying a controlling 60% stake in Atome Financial, the Singapore-based BNPL and consumer-lending platform owned by Advance Intelligence Group, for USD 1.49bn in cash. Atome operates across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, serving 25mn users and a USD 1bn gross loan portfolio. The deal pairs Atome’s AI-driven underwriting with Grab’s ride-hailing and delivery ecosystem, targeting a USD 6bn loan book by 2028. Grab has also agreed to acquire the remaining 40% roughly two years after closing, at a performance-linked valuation of between USD 2bn and USD 4.5bn. The initial transaction is expected to close by Q3 2027.

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