German-American combinations, further evidenced this week by Deutsche Bank AG's effort to acquire Bankers Trust Corp. for $9.2 billion and Thyssen AG's $1.1 billion purchase of Dover Corp.'s elevator unit, stress the strategic urgency for European companies to reach around the world, investors and dealmakers said.

Paul Gibbs of J.P. Morgan's London mergers and acquisitions team, said, "Competition is becoming global. In a sense, it is a global scramble for capital, and the leaders in that are the global firms. The winners will be those who pull off the global strategy successfully."

And the victors, as well as the vanquished, now are more clearly defined because of changes in analytical perspectives, he said.

"The investment community has shifted to following the Europeanfirms across industry sectors now rather than by country," Gibbs said. "That makes comparison of a German firm with a British firm, or a French firm, much more relevant. That is why you need leading performance and leading valuation compared to your European peers."

To be global, Gibbs said, a corporation needs to be a major player in Europe, while active in the US market, which is effectively the same size as Europe in terms of gross domestic product.

Joining the German companies in the New World vanguard, he said, are those from Britain and Switzerland.

In August, British Petroleum Co Plc announced its $48 billion merger with Amoco Corp., creating the world's third-largest oil company.

The BP-Amoco deal was preceded by the May unveiling of the $40 billion combination of Daimler-Benz AG and Chrysler Corp. into DaimlerChrysler AG, now the world's fifth-largest carmaker.

Other US-German deals crafted this year include Bertelsmann AG's $1.3 billion purchase of publisher Random House from AdvancePublications Inc. and Bayer AG's acquisition of Chiron Corp.'s diagnostic business for $1.1 billion.

Riad Younes, co-manager of the Julius Baer International Equity Fund, said, "In Europe now, national boundaries mean less and less. With the World Trade Organisation and... trade agreements year after year... we are getting to very low trade barriers and the global economy of the future.

"The Germans and the British (companies) are thinking more globally because they are the strongest in Europe," he said, while other countries on the Continent are busy with international deals designed in part to keep their commercial institutions from "disappearing" once they enter the global mergers and acquisition arena.

Younes said the extent of globalisation in a given industry is determined largely by the degree of regulation and the efficiency of movement of the particular product or service.

"Highly regulated industries tend to be very local, and there is less pressure to think globally if the good is very hardto trade. If you go to a hairdresser in Manhattan and they charge 10 times more than in North Carolina, you are not going to travel to North Carolina for a haircut," the portfolio manager said.

If a potential deal is prohibitively expensive, European companies facing global imperatives will opt for a joint venture or starting an overseas unit from scratch, although, "Valuation will not be that important, it will be strategic -- survival in the New World, that is the major driver," Younes said.