Contact: Brenon Daly
For the first two months of the second quarter, tech M&A spending flowed along at basically twice the monthly rate it had been reaching since last summer. The activity spanned virtually all sectors of technology, with chipmakers, storage vendors and telecom giants confidently and consistently throwing billions of dollars at deals in an effort to secure new growth. (Even a reluctant shopper like Microsoft got into the act.) It was like dealmakers had finally – and indelibly – moved past the Great Recession.
Then came the June swoon. Spending on tech deals in the final month of the quarter plummeted nearly two-thirds from the totals for both April and May. The value of transactions announced in June is running at just $9.6bn, the lowest level since February 2010. Of the 10 largest transactions announced in the past three months, only one came in June.
The dramatic decline in June derailed the recovery in the M&A market, leaving the spending totals in the just-completed second quarter below both the year-ago quarter and the first quarter of 2011. We’ll have a full report on second-quarter M&A activity – and what we expect for the remainder of the year – in tonight’s Daily 451 and 451 TechDealmaker sendouts.
2011 activity, month by month
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase