Contact: Brenon Daly
If you have a hard time thinking of a truly blockbuster tech deal last year, you’re not alone. Even people who buy companies for a living struggled to single out any 2017 transaction.
As we do every year, we asked in our 451 Research Corporate Development Outlook Survey for dealmakers to look at the handiwork of their peers around the tech industry and select what they thought was the most significant transaction of the year. Survey respondents work at tech companies of all varieties, but regardless of their industry, the majority of their picks each year usually settle on one or two high-profile deals.
That wasn’t at all the case for our most recent survey. For starters, the pool of 2017 nominees was unprecedentedly broad and shallow. Corporate buyers put forward a record 12 separate transactions for the deal of the year.
From that long list, however, we don’t actually have a winner. Or rather, we have three winners. For the first time in more than a decade of giving out our Golden Tombstone award, we have a tie. Fittingly enough for the diffuse deals that characterized last year, we have a tie between three transactions: Intel’s $15.3bn reach for Mobileye, Cisco outbidding the public market for AppDynamics and Broadcom’s unsolicited bid for Qualcomm. We’re still working on cutting the Golden Tombstone into three pieces so each of the winners can have their own chunk of M&A immortality.