NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The recent wave of big mergers has been focused on basic materials like oil or steel, but experts say a host of other sectors are ripe for consolidation as 2006 shapes up to be one of the hottest years in the history of corporate deal-making.

Monday saw a $40 billion deal with miner Phelps Dodge (Charts) agreeing to buy two Canadian nickel producers, Inco and Falconbridge.

Experts say the flurry of merger activity seen in 2006 is likely to continue, and will hit more than just commodity businesses.

In addition, Mittal finally won over rival steel producer Arcelor in a transaction worth roughly $32 billion. Those deals come on top of Friday's $21 billion agreement by oil company Anadarko (Charts) to buy Kerr-McGee and Western Gas Resources, two smaller energy firms.

There's no doubt the high price of commodities has helped drive deal-making in the basic materials sector.

"It's the capability to pay for these deals," said Richard Peterson, a researcher at Thomson Financial. "Companies have a lot of cash."

Peterson said mergers and acquisitions have jumped 30 percent worldwide so far this year, to $1.75 trillion worth of deals, putting them on track to surpass the record $3.4 trillion racked up in 2000.

But he said it's not just oil and commodities that are helping tip the scales.

He noted Johnson & Johnson's (Charts) $16 billion agreement to buy Pfizer's consumer products unit, announced Monday, as well as deals from earlier this year, such as Wachovia's (Charts) $25 billion pact for Golden West and AT&T's (Charts) $67 billion buyout of BellSouth, the largest deal so far this year. (See correction).

Going forward, experts predict a flurry of merger activities in fields like finance, retail, telecommunications, and agriculture.

As Lou Bevilacqua an M&A specialist at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft put it, deals will happen in "anything that has a solid stream of revenue" that can be borrowed against.

In addition to the boom in commodities prices, other things fueling mergers include relatively low interest rates, higher cash balances thanks to productivity gains and three years of solid corporate earnings, and the proliferation of private investors buying out companies through so-called private equity funds.

"It's use it or lose it," Steven Bernard, director of M&A Market Analysis for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Chicago, said of the private equity and hedge funds. "They need to put that money to work."

But commodities, supported by the higher underlying prices, are still seen to be one of the hotter sectors for takeover news in the next 12 months.

Bolstered by reserves in the ground which many believe will continue to command a high price in the wake of strong global demand, firms aren't scared to pay up for other companies, as witnessed last week when Anadarko paid a nearly 30 percent premium for Kerr-McGee.

"It's like when you know that big bonus is coming, you start going out car shopping," said Samuel Weaver, a finance professor at Lehigh University.

Several experts mentioned ethanol companies like Verasun (Charts) or Pacific Ethanol (Charts) as possible takeover targets, as buzz continues to swirl around the plant-based fuel.

Weaver also mentioned construction materials as another possible sector for consolidation, noting that most building material firms tend to be "mom-and-pop" operations in what "really is a splintered industry."

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(Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the terms of the AT&T-BellSouth deal. CNNMoney regrets the error).