Mars-Wrigley. Microsoft-Yahoo. CME-Nymex. Pernod Ricard-Vin & Sprit. These are among the biggest deals of 2008–more than $70 billion of announced M&A volume–and they are all strategic, meaning one company buying another.

Flashback to a year ago. At the height of the M&A boom, corporate buyers were routinely beaten out for target companies by private-equity firms. When the credit crunch set in last summer and the easy money that fueled the buyout binge dried up, the expectation was that corporate buyers would seize the day.

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So are strategic buyers finally back?

The data show a mixed bag. Despite a number of name-grabbing transactions, strategic acquirers aren’t exactly seizing the day, though they aren’t exactly on the sidelines like private equity either. The volume of deals done by corporate buyers globally is down 25% for the year to date, but the number of transactions is up 18%, according to Dealogic. For corporate buyers in the U.S., strategic deal volume is off just 6% and the number of deals is up 19%.

But in many ways, the picture hasn’t changed from August, just a couple of months after the credit crisis hit. That month private-equity deal volume slid 64% from the year-earlier month. On the strategic side, deal volume fell 6%, but the number of deals jumped 13%, as the average size of strategic transactions globally fell 28% to $114.4 million, according to Dealogic.