Contact: Brenon Daly
After surging through the first three quarters of 2014, tech M&A spending is now normalizing as we head toward the close of the year. The aggregate total of spending on tech, media and telcom transactions across the globe in the just-completed month of November totaled just $18.5bn – less than half average monthly spending during the first nine months of the year. The recent slowdown in what had been a frenetic pace means 2014 is unlikely to break the eight-year-old record for tech M&A spending.
November’s deceleration comes after an even-slower October, which totaled just $12.9bn in deal value. Both those levels actually declined from the same months in 2013. Those were the first year-on-year declines registered in what had been a record pace for M&A spending. Through the first three quarters of 2014, spending was twice the level it had been in 2013, and was tracking to an all-time high.
This year has already set the record for annual spending on tech deals since the recessions. (It actually eclipsed the high-water mark from 2013 back in June.) Through November, deal-makers had already announced transactions valued at nearly $410bn, lagging the full-year 2006 record of $460bn. To get up near that lofty level, December spending will need to pick back up to the monthly level of about $40bn we saw through the first three quarters of 2014, rather than the average of about $15bn we’ve seen so far in the final quarter of the year.
Recent M&A activity
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase