Contact: Brenon Daly
Much like the stock market, the M&A market opened solidly in January but petered out as the month went along. We previously noted that big-name buyers (including EMC, Oracle, Apple and Cisco Systems, among others) all kicked off 2010 with an acquisition in the first week folks were back at their desks. However, the pace of deals slowed noticeably after the initial flurry.
Overall for January, we tallied 281 transactions, totaling $4.4bn in spending. Some 62% of the deals (175 transactions) came in the first two weeks of the month, compared to just 38% (106 transactions) in the back half of the month. And although spending in the last two weeks of January outstripped the first half, the increase is entirely due to a single mammoth deal, Tyco’s $2bn purchase of Brink’s Home Security Holdings. If we subtract that consolidation play, we see that some 71% of spending took place in the first half of the month. The remaining 29% came in the last two weeks of January, when the Nasdaq recorded virtually all of its full-month decline of 4%.