IT mergers and acquisitions take off at the end of 2020

The takeovers of IT companies do not know the crisis. Indeed, the global technology industry’s M&A deals totaled $ 243.37 billion in the last quarter of 2020 (October to December 2020), according to the GlobalData database. The report, released by the London-based data analytics and consulting firm, shows an increase of 12.5% ​​from the previous quarter. In the distribution among different regions of the world, North America leads with a total of transactions announced during the period amounting to $ 121.92 billion.

Europe, which occupies the second place in the ranking (according to the value of transactions), sees all of its transactions amount to 85.61 billion dollars, followed by Asia Pacific which has a total of 31, $ 41 billion in transactions.

According to the GlobalData report, the top country in terms of M&A activity in Q4 2020 was the United States with 680 transactions, followed by the United Kingdom with 159 and China with 115. Note that the States United tops the list in terms of transaction value at $ 117.97 billion, or over 96% of the total amount for the North America region.

Focus on five operations

Among all the offers, five merger and acquisition transactions marked the fourth quarter of 2020, representing alone 52.9% of the overall value of transactions for the end of the year. The combined value of these five technology deals was $ 128.66 billion, compared to an aggregate value of $ 243.37 billion recorded for the quarter.

In October 2020, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) got its hands on Xilinx – expert in programmable chips (FPGA) and SmartNIC – for 35 billion dollars. With this specialty, AMD hopes to strengthen its position in the data center sector.

At the end of October, Marvell Technology bought Inphi for 10.27 billion dollars and expanded its range of semiconductors, in particular chips for optical networks, which are very popular in 5G infrastructures.

Among these behemoths of the American technology industry, an intruder, the Spanish company Cellnex Telecom (specializing in the purchase of high points for mobile telephony), which acquires CK Hutchison Holdings for a total of assets of 11.69 billions of dollars. This transaction will ultimately add 30,000 telecommunication sites in Europe.

S&P Global announced its merger with IHS Markit for $ 44 billion last November, in order to accelerate its growth and combine certain activities such as credit ratings, business intelligence activities and S&P Global stock and energy indices with the IHS Markit benchmarks and bond indices, bond prices and benchmarks, and information on the natural resources, automotive and engineering sectors as reported by Reuters.

Last of the year, this operation is a masterstroke in the collaboration sector. In early December 2020, the Salesforce giant bites Slack for $ 27.7 billion (the acquisition is being finalized). This transaction is the most important carried out by the software publisher since its creation in 2000. Salesforce thus wishes to align itself with the market for remote collaboration tools in front of Microsoft and its Teams solution, as well as Zoom.