Contact: Brenon Daly
For the first two months of the just-completed second quarter, tech dealmakers went about their business at the same sedate pace they had all year. Then came the June boom. Spending on tech, media and telecom (TMT) acquisitions in the final month of Q2 tripled from the average level in the five previous months, with June alone featuring six of the seven largest TMT deals announced in all of Q2, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. The late flurry of big-ticket transactions helped elevate M&A spending from the middling level it had sunk to in 2016 after last year’s record run.
If Q2 ended with a bang for M&A, the same could certainly be said about geopolitics. In what is widely considered the largest reshaping – and the sharpest reversal – in Europe since World War II, the UK narrowly voted in late June to end its European Union membership. The so-called ‘Brexit’ decision immediately sparked a wave of selling on equity exchanges around the world that incinerated trillions of dollars of market value.
As the political instability and economic uncertainty sparked by the unprecedented vote by members of the world’s fifth-largest economy rippled around the world, shell-shocked dealmakers stepped out of the market. In the final week of June – a period that covers the results of the UK vote and the immediate aftermath – the number of deals dropped by fully one-quarter compared with the weekly average of the first three weeks of the month. More dramatically, transactions announced in the post-Brexit week accounted for only 4% of the total spending in June. (Obviously, these are very short-term reactions to the historic event. See our analysis of the potential longer-term impact of Brexit on the tech economy, including employee movement, taxes and tariffs, privacy, and capital markets.)
Yet even as June ended with a whimper, the robust activity before Brexit boosted overall Q2 spending to $107bn, about 50% higher than the $73bn recorded in Q1, according to the M&A KnowledgeBase. (However, for some perspective on just how far M&A spending has fallen from last year’s historic levels, spending in the just-completed Q2 stands at just half the level of Q2 2015.) Still, the flurry of sizable deals in the first three weeks of June lifts the total value of year-to-date transactions to about $180bn, putting 2016 on track for the third-highest-spending year since the end of the recession.
Recent quarterly deal flow
|
Source: 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase