Contact: Brenon Daly
After playing small ball for the first few months of the year, buyout shops have begun taking bigger swings in the M&A market. That’s nowhere more evident than in the bustling enterprise software sector, where private equity (PE) firms have displaced their strategic rivals as the main buyers at the top end of the market.
According to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase, PE shops have been the acquirers in four of five enterprise software transactions announced so far this year valued at more than $1bn. (The big-ticket shopping list: the $3bn take-private of Qlik, the $1.8bn take-private of Marketo and the $1.7bn take-private of Cvent, as well as the $1.1bn purchase of Sitecore.) Set against this recent string of 10-digit deals by financial buyers, the only corporate acquirer to ink a similarly sized transaction is Salesforce with its $2.8bn reach for Demandware.
The fact that buyout barons are leading the current software shopping spree is a direct reversal of recent years. At this point last year, for instance, there were four software deals valued at more than $1bn, with corporate acquirers announcing three of them, according to the M&A KnowledgeBase. More broadly, PE firms typically account for only about 10-20% of overall M&A spending in any given year. So far this year in the software sector, however, PE shops have accounted for just less than half of announced spending.
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