Contact: Brenon Daly
During the six-year bull run on Wall Street, corporate treasuries have been as flush with cash as executive offices have been flush with confidence. Put those two factors together and we have the makings of an M&A boom like the one that has put spending on tech acquisitions so far this year already twice as high as it was in the recession years.
Remove either of the crucial components of cash and confidence, however, and deals don’t get done. It’s hard to go shopping when your head is spinning with volatility and your guts are clenched in uncertainty. That hesitancy comes through clearly when we look at the prints for August.
In the first two weeks of the month, it was business as usual. Private equity shops and corporate buyers around the globe announced 172 tech, media and telecom (TMT) transactions with an aggregate value of $21.6bn, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. In the two weeks that followed, as black swans flew above the equity markets around the world, dealmakers announced just 145 acquisitions worth $4.6bn. As uncertainty erased trillions of dollars of stock market capitalization over the past two weeks, spending on M&A plunged almost 80%.
Heavily skewed to the first half of the month, August spending totaled $26.2bn, which is roughly half the average amount for the previous seven months of 2015. Yet even with the mini-recession in tech M&A since mid-August, spending on 2015 deals overall is still tracking to its highest level since 2000. Through eight months of the year, dealmakers have announced transactions valued at about $375bn, roughly $45bn short of the $420bn recorded in 2007.
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