After a slow start for tech M&A, business picks up late in Q1 

Contact: Brenon Daly 

After record spending in the tech M&A market in 2015 and 2016, dealmakers took a little while to get going this year. The value of tech transactions in both January and February slumped to the lowest consecutive monthly totals since 2013, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. The two-year surge seemingly led to a two-month slump, as buyers digested their acquisitions. By the final month of the first quarter, however, acquirers were back in business, spending as much in March as they did in the two previous months combined.

Altogether, as tallied by the M&A KnowledgeBase, worldwide spending on tech and telecom deals in the first three months of 2017 hit $77bn, essentially flat with the opening quarter last year. However, the value of transactions announced in each of the subsequent quarters in 2016 accelerated dramatically from last year’s sluggish start, with average quarterly spending for Q2-Q4 coming in nearly twice the level of Q1.

Matching last year’s acceleration in spending may be a challenge for the rest of 2017, as buyers are on pace to do substantially fewer deals this year. That’s true for both broad tech M&A as well as the top end of the market. The first quarter’s deal volume of 910 represents a decline of roughly 12% compared with the January-March period in the previous two years. More significantly, tech acquirers announced fewer transactions valued at more than $1bn in the just-completed quarter than in any other quarter in more than three years.