Category: Private Equity

Webinar: 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster M&A Leaders’ Survey

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Even as tech dealmaking clips along at a post-bubble record rate in 2015, the overwhelming view from the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster is that business is expected to get even more brisk as the year progresses. To find out more about the forecast, as well as how the survey sentiment maps to both the current M&A market and current M&A practices, join 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster on Tuesday, May 19 at 1pm EST (10am PST) for an information-packed webinar. Click here to register.

The webinar will cover not only the forecast for acquisition activity for the next six months, but also what buyers expect to have to pay to cover their purchases and what strategies will be driving those deals. Additionally, Morrison & Foerster will provide real-world insight on some of the key findings around recent trends in structuring transactions and other practical M&A considerations. To register for the complimentary webinar, simply click here.

M&A activity forecast for the next six months

Survey date Increase Stay the same Decrease
April 2015 61% 30% 9%
October 2014 48% 36% 16%
April 2014 72% 24% 4%
October 2013 50% 43% 7%
April 2013 54% 27% 19%
October 2012 49% 34% 17%
April 2012 59% 33% 8%

Source: M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research / Morrison & Foerster

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

April activity keeps 2015 on pace for record tech M&A

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Tech acquirers stayed busy in April, keeping 2015 on track for post-bubble records for both the number of transactions as well as the spending on them. The just-completed month saw 341 tech, media and telco (TMT) deals valued at $42.1bn announced around the globe, exactly matching the totals from April 2014, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. However, adding a little bit more perspective on the recent flurry of activity, we would note that the spending of some $42bn in both April 2015 and April 2014 is twice as high as the same month in 2013 and 2012 combined.

While M&A activity was strong across a number of sectors, the top end of the market was particularly active. Last month, 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase tallied nine transactions with an equity value of more than $1bn. Notable big prints included Nokia’s $16.5bn consolidation of telecom equipment rival Alcatel-Lucent; Informatica’s $5.3bn take-private, the largest leveraged buyout in nearly two years; and LinkedIn’s $1.5bn purchase of lynda.com, which is almost 10 times larger than any other deal the employment networking site has done.

With four months of 2015 already in the books, tech acquirers have spent $162bn on transactions. That’s more than they dropped on deals for all of 2009. More significantly, if we annualize activity so far this year, 2015 is on track for just shy of a half-trillion dollars of M&A consideration. That would handily top the previous record of roughly $420bn reached in both 2006 and 2007.

And, we would note that tech acquirers are telling us they plan to be active. In the just-completed M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster, slightly more than six out of 10 tech dealmakers and investment bankers expect their pace of acquisitions to accelerate over the next half-year, the second-most-bullish response we’ve received in the seven editions of the survey. See our full report on the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster.

2015 monthly deal flow

Period Deal volume Deal value
January 2015 357 $11bn
February 2015 332 $48bn
March 2015 332 $61bn
April 2015 337 $42bn

Source: 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Survey: Already busy tech acquirers expect to be even busier

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Even as tech M&A activity clips along at a post-bubble record rate in 2015, business is expected to get even more brisk as the year progresses. Slightly more than six out of 10 tech dealmakers and investment bankers expect their pace of acquisitions to accelerate over the next half-year, the second-most-bullish response in the seven editions of the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster. The 61% of respondents forecasting a pickup in activity over the next six months is almost seven times the number (9%) anticipating a slowdown.

The solidly bullish outlook for 2015 – with nine out of 10 respondents forecasting that their M&A activity will either hold steady or pick up through October – comes as the year has started busier than any year since the Internet bubble burst. In just the first four months of 2015, tech acquirers have announced some $160bn worth of global TMT transactions, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. The year-to-date spending, which is already higher than the full-year total for recession-wracked 2009, puts 2015 on track for just shy of a half-trillion dollars of M&A consideration.

We would also note that the last time respondents to the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster clearly signaled their intent to acquire, the projection did indeed come through in prints. In the survey from April 2014, a record seven out of 10 respondents (72%) indicated that they planned to accelerate their M&A in the year. Last year’s total value of deals hit an astonishing $390bn – a post-recession record that came in at basically twice the average annual spending from 2009-2013, according to the KnowledgeBase.

Look for a full report on the M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research and Morrison & Foerster – including what will be driving deals in the coming years, as well as what buyers expect to have to pay for those transactions – on the 451 Research website later today and in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.

M&A spending outlook for the next six months

Survey date Increase Stay the same Decrease
April 2015 61% 30% 9%
October 2014 48% 36% 16%
April 2014 72% 24% 4%
October 2013 50% 43% 7%
April 2013 54% 27% 19%
October 2012 49% 34% 17%
April 2012 59% 33% 8%

Source: M&A Leaders’ Survey from 451 Research / Morrison & Foerster

After dating, InfoVista marries the girl from Ipanema

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Announcing its third – and largest – acquisition since its take-private in 2011, InfoVista has paid an undisclosed amount for Ipanema Technologies. The deal between the two France-based companies, which had an existing technology partnership, extends InfoVista’s core network performance management to the applications that run on them. Founded in 1999, Ipanema is primarily known for its WAN optimization offering.

The purchase also brings InfoVista, which does virtually all of its sales directly, Ipanema’s sales channel. Ipanema goes to market primarily through more than 50 partners, including many of the large Western European communication service providers such as Telefónica and BT. Altogether, it serves some 750 enterprise customers. (Subscribers to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase can see our estimate for Ipanema’s revenue here.) We’ll have a full report on this transaction in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Growth gets a premium at soon-to-be-private Informatica

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

A buyout group is taking Informatica private for $5.3bn, a full $1bn more than the middleware vendor’s primary rival got in its LBO just a half-year earlier. Private equity (PE) shop Permira, along with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, says it will pay $48.75 in cash for each share of Informatica, or $5.3bn in total. That’s the highest price for the stock in two years but only a slight closing premium for Informatica, which had been under pressure from a hedge fund to sell. The deal is expected to close by Q3 2015.

At an equity value of $5.3bn, Informatica is the largest company to be erased from a US exchange by a PE firm since BMC went private in May 2013 for $6.9bn. More importantly, Informatica is getting a much richer sendoff than either comparable multibillion-dollar enterprise software LBOs or, more specifically, the take-private of rival TIBCO.

Debt-free Informatica’s cash holding of $722m lowers the enterprise value of the proposed transaction to $4.6bn. That works out to 4.4x Informatica’s trailing revenue. For comparison, other significant recent software LBOs have gone off at least a full turn lower (Compuware at 3.1x trailing sales, BMC at 3.2x), while TIBCO garnered 3.8x in its take-private by Vista Equity Partners last September. (Informatica is also getting a richer valuation than the other relevant – if a bit dated – middleware deal: Ascential Software, which was only one-quarter the size of TIBCO and Informatica, got 3.6x in its sale to IBM in 2005.)

What did Informatica do to get a premium, relative to other software hawkers, from its buyout buyers? In a word: growth. While virtually all of the other software providers that have gone private recently have struggled to bump up their top line, Informatica has posted mid-teens-percentage revenue growth over the past half-decade. (The company cracked $1bn in sales in 2014, a significant step up from the $650m it posted in 2010.) Yet even with sales increasing, Informatica still drew the attention – and agitation – of activist hedge fund Elliott Management.

Significant middleware transactions

Date announced Acquirer Target Deal value Enterprise value/trailing sales valuation
April 7, 2015 Permira, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Informatica $5.3bn 4.4x
September 29, 2014 Vista Equity Partners TIBCO $4.2bn 3.8x
March 14, 2005 IBM Ascential Software $1.1bn 3.6x

Source: 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Telcos get busy again with M&A in February

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Massive acquisitions by telcos, which pushed M&A spending to a recent record in 2014, once again helped to inflate the value of deals announced in the just-completed month of February. Overall, tech and telco acquirers spent $48bn on transactions across the globe, according to The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase. However, the three largest deals, which were all telco-related purchases, accounted for $30bn, or 60%, of the total spending in February.

Last month’s big-ticket acquisitions by BT Global Services, Frontier Communications and American Tower revived the telco shopping spree from 2014. Last year, telco and media purchases accounted for roughly half of the $439bn we tallied in M&A spending – the highest level in 14 years. (See our full report on M&A last year, as well as the outlook for this this year.) There were no significant telco transactions in January, which is one of the main reasons why M&A spending for the first month of 2015 was just one-fifth the amount spent in the second month of 2015.

Beyond the telco consolidation, there are clear indications that the broader tech M&A market is picking up the pace after the slow start. Expedia did its largest-ever deal last month, announcing the $1.4bn pickup of Orbitz Worldwide. And Canon, an infrequent acquirer, inked a $2.8bn buy. Even excluding the trio of telco deals, there were four transactions in February valued at more than $1bn – twice as many 10-digit acquisitions announced in January.

Additionally, the overall volume of M&A remained high in February. We tallied 331 transactions announced last month. That’s nearly one-third more than February 2014 or February 2013. Shoppers included Check Point Software, which announced its first acquisition in more than three years; four purchases by the insatiable acquirer Google; and a double-barrel set of deals by Under Armour.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

Webinar: What to expect in tech M&A in 2015?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

With a record-breaking year in tech M&A behind us, what’s in store for 2015? Join 451 Research on Tuesday, January 27 at 1:00 PM EST for a look ahead on where acquirers are likely to be looking to do deals, and what they’re likely to pay. The webinar, which highlights the analysis and forecasts in our 2015 M&A Outlook, is free to attend – register here.

We’ll start with a look back at 2014 to highlight some of the trends and big-ticket transactions that helped push tech M&A spending to its highest level since the Internet bubble burst. What had buyers spending freely last year – including 75 transactions valued at more than $1bn – and will that carry over to this year?

Then, we’ll address other timely topics, including:

  • What does the data from our surveys of corporate acquirers and bankers, as well as insight from our analysts, tell us to expect for tech M&A in 2015?
  • Specifically, what sectors of the IT landscape will be active this year – and why? We will highlight trends from a handful of major markets (mobility, cloud, security, networking) that are likely to drive deals.
  • Private equity firms announced more tech acquisitions in 2014 than in any other year, often paying prices they would not have paid in the past. Is this the start of a new aggressiveness by financial acquirers?
  • What’s the outlook for the IPO market, and which startups might be ready to go public this year?
  • Startups may be pulling down sky-high valuations in recent funding, but the forecast among corporate buyers for the exit valuations of startups isn’t nearly as bullish. How big is the bid/ask spread likely to be this year?

The webinar draws from both the qualitative insight of more than 100 analysts at 451 Research, as well as a number of quantitative resources to get a sense of the broad influences that are shaping M&A in 2015. To register for the webinar, click here.

What do the main buyers in the tech M&A market see for the year ahead?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Last year was a big year for tech M&A, but what was the biggest deal of year? To find out, we asked the main buyers in the tech M&A market: corporate development executives. As part of a broader survey, we had them look at the handiwork of their peers and give us their pick for the most significant tech transaction of 2014.

So which deal got the Golden Tombstone? Facebook’s $19bn cash-and-stock acquisition of WhatsApp. The purchase last February by the 10-year-old social network represents the largest VC-backed exit in history. It drew twice as many votes as the second-place transaction, SAP’s $8.3bn reach for Concur Technologies, which is the largest-ever SaaS acquisition.

Additionally, we asked the corporate acquirers what they expected for the coming year. Their responses point to a continuation of the record run of tech M&A. More than half of corporate development executives (58%) indicated that they expect their company to pick up the pace of dealmaking in 2015. That stands as the highest forecast in a half-decade and compares with just one in five respondents (6%) projecting a slowdown in their M&A activity in the coming year.

Other highlights from the survey of corporate development executives include a bearish outlook for startup valuations, a record forecast for IPOs and the expectation of unprecedented amount of competition in deals from their private equity rivals in 2015. Subscribers: See the full report.

Top vote getter for ‘most significant tech transaction’

Year Deal
2014 Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp
2013 IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer
2012 VMware’s acquisition of Nicira
2011 Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility
2010 Intel’s acquisition of McAfee
2009 Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems
2008 Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of EDS
2007 Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource

Source: 451 Research Tech Corporate Development Outlook Survey

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

With buyers old and new placing big bets, tech M&A hits record in 2014

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Spending on tech deals surged to a new record in 2014, driven not only by massive consolidation by old-line telco buyers, but also by the ever-increasing prices of bets placed on next-generation technology. Tech buyers across the globe announced transactions valued at $440bn last year, according to the 451 Research M&A KnowledgeBase. That topped the previous record (set in 2007) by 5% and, more dramatically, comes in at twice the average annual spending on tech deals since the credit crisis.

The nearly half-trillion dollars’ worth of deal value was, of course, dominated by telecommunications and media transactions. Last year’s two largest acquisitions (AT&T’s $48.5bn play for DIRECTV, and Comcast’s $45.2bn reach for Time Warner Cable) accounted for slightly more than 20% of the total yearly spending.

Add to that European telcos and cable outfits, which also took advantage of a highly attractive debt market, and bought up rivals at an unprecedented rate in 2014. Major buyers on the Continent included Altice, Vodafone and British Sky Broadcasting. Altogether, telco and media deals around the world accounted for roughly half of last year’s total spending.

The other half came from a series of speculative deals by emerging tech icons – emboldened by record amounts of cash and, in many cases, record prices for their stock. For instance, Facebook – which finished last year with shares trading around an all-time high – not only paid the highest price for a VC-backed startup ($19bn for WhatsApp) but also rolled the dice on a virtual reality company that barely had a prototype product (it paid $2bn in March for Oculus VR). Similarly, Google dropped $3.2bn on Nest Labs. The maker of ‘smart’ thermostats may offer Google a way into broader home-automation offerings. Or not.

More established tech stalwarts also paid up for deals last year. SAP announced the largest-ever SaaS transaction, its $8.3bn acquisition of Concur Technologies in the summer. SAP valued the travel and expense management application vendor three times more richly than SAP itself is valued. Oracle inked its largest deal in a half-decade, handing over $5.3bn for old-line hospitality software provider MICROS Systems in June.

And finally, in addition to strategic acquirers, financial buyers got back to business in 2014, announcing more than $50bn worth of transactions, according to the 451 Research M&A KnowledgeBase. Included in last year’s total are a number of headline-grabbing LBOs (TIBCO Software, Riverbed Technology, Compuware), as well as a healthy number of sponsor-driven midmarket transactions.

Global tech M&A

Year Deal volume Deal value
2014 3872 $439bn
2013 3275 $255bn
2012 3644 $186bn
2011 3794 $232bn
2010 3293 $190bn
2009 3030 $143bn
2008 3098 $326bn
2007 3654 $420bn
2006 4036 $418bn
2005 3054 $360bn
2004 2091 $219bn
2003 1514 $60bn
2002 1922 $81bn

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.

A buyout for Bitdefender?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Bitdefender is rumored to be the latest European antivirus (AV) vendor of scale to be picked up by a buyout shop. Several market sources have indicated that Romania-based Bitdefender, which is a division of a larger company and hasn’t taken outside funding, has been sold. Neither the price nor the private equity (PE) acquirer could be immediately learned.

According to our understanding, Bitdefender generates about $50m in revenue. The consumer-focused company says its AV technology protects 500 million users, which is more than twice as many as rival AVG claims. In addition to selling directly, Bitdefender also OEMs its offering to more than 100 partners, which partially accounts for how the company’s technology has made it onto a half-billion machines.

A number of PE firms already have Europe-based, consumer-focused AV providers in their portfolios, including Apax Partners with Sophos, Summit Partners with AVAST and TA Associates with AVG, although that company is now publicly traded. Also, General Atlantic (briefly) owned a minority stake of Kaspersky Lab.

In general, those investments haven’t generated stellar returns for the buyout barons. GA had a less-than-harmonious holding of Russian firm Kaspersky for about a year. AVAST didn’t make it public when it was on file two years ago. And both Sophos and AVG have been valued in the range of 2-3x sales. Applying that multiple to Bitdefender would value it at roughly $100-150m.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.