Even with a shift toward Europe and Asia, the United States remains the single biggest fee pool.
The winners received $23,240 from the entry-fee pool, and their purchasers in the auction divided $230,152.
Since 2000, the share of the mergers-and-acquisitions fee pool claimed by the industry behemoths has shrunk to 44 percent from 63 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.
That is significantly better than the Americas, where the fee pool grew just 22 percent, and Europe, where it shrank by 15 percent.
Growth was strongest in India, rising by 47% a year from a low base, but the fee pool in China and its region was almost the size of Japan's, which has a much larger domestic market (see chart 9).
The industrials sector, which includes aerospace and defense, is a rare bright spot in an lackadaisical mergers market, and represents the second-largest fee pool globally after telecommunications, media and technology.
Having so many competitors involved in a deal decreases everyone's share of a fee pool that is fixed, sometimes to the point that helping sell an I.P.O. is no longer profitable.
According to the WSJ, a successful Silver Lake/Dell deal alone would create the largest fee pool since the turn of the decade and would generate the most advisory income from a leveraged buyout since the Texan energy group TXU was acquired for $32bn in 2007.
Over the next four years, UBS consistently ranked in the top 4 in the global fee pool and established a track record of 20 consecutive quarters of rising profits.
