This article originally appeared on The Business Times.

The environment for finding and winning deals didn't get any easier in 2017, but private equity generated a strong increase in investment value during the year. Global buyout value, including add-on transactions, grew 19 percent in 2017 to US$440 billion, supported by a stream of large public-to-private deals.

Global deal count, however, was essentially flat, growing just 2 percent to 3,077 deals. That's off 19 percent from 2014, the high-water mark for deal activity in the current economic cycle, as PE funds wrestled with a number of market challenges.

This disconnect between the value and number of deals done reflects a stubborn dynamic affecting deal making in most regions around the world: While funds have ample money to spend, they have too few attractive targets to spend it on.

As discussed in Bain & Company's Global Private Equity Report 2018, investors have allocated more capital to private equity over the past five years than at any time in history.

Read the full article at The Business Times.

The writers are leaders of Bain & Company's Private Equity practice.