It's been a curious year for tech M&As, with most of the activity coming from VCs: as tech stock values plummeted throughout the year, these companies went public. bargain hunting. They saw companies with a lot of potential that were seriously undervalued in the brutal market conditions of 2022.
But curiously, The year began with Microsoft's announcement to acquire Activision Blizzard for a staggering $69.000 billion in January, followed in April by the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk for $44.000 billion. However, none of these operations has entered this list, since they are not really companies. But they show the promise and the sheer volume of money that has been moved this year.
After these deals are discounted, the top two deals still involve companies buying desirable properties for a lot of money, but much of the top 10 is dominated by real estate companies. venture capital, with Thoma Bravo in three of the top 10 and Vista Equity Partners in two. Thoma completed six multi-million dollar deals in 2022 and Vista three. That's a lot of action for a year.
Keep in mind that Google bought Mandiant for $5.400 billion and Intel bought Tower Semiconductor for the same price.. This year, at least $6.000 billion was needed to be in the top 10. This figure is higher than the 5.400 billion last year and the 3.500 billion in 2020. Operations this year amounted to a total of 153.900 billion dollars, compared to 121.000 billion in 2021 and 165.000 billion in 2020, a year in which several chip companies changed hands in a period of industry consolidation.
We saw a lot of smaller deals — smaller in M&A money, that is — as companies snapped up smaller startups. These transactions are not listed, but among them are Celonis's $100 million purchase of Process Analytics Factory and Snowflake's $800 million purchase of Streamlit. Many other deals were so small that companies did not have to disclose the purchase price, such as IBM's purchase of Envizi or Zoom's purchase of Solvvy.
Nvidia has renounced its $40.000 billion offer to buy Arm after coming under intense regulatory scrutiny. In addition, Zendesk scrapped its bid to buy Momentive, the company behind SurveyMonkey, for $4.100 billion after investors rejected the deal. Eventually, Zendesk would be acquired and make our list.
Several deals on this list face intense regulatory scrutiny, including the first two, so it remains to be seen if all of these deals will make it to the finish line or join Nvidia in choosing to avoid the cost of fighting a government entity. , whether in the US, UK or EU. That could be the true M&A legacy of 2022, but time will tell.
Without further ado, here are the top 10 business M&A deals of 2022:
10. OpenText acquires Micro Focus for $6.000 billion.
Not a big deal in the scheme of things - a legacy software company buys a legacy software company - and, truth be told, Micro Focus itself has acquired a ton of legacy titles over the years, including Borland. and Novell. It also partnered with HPE in 2016 in an $8.000 billion deal. As noted about the deal when it was announced, this was less about building the catalog with a compatible product than simply getting bigger. Even so, it was good for number 10 on this year's list.
9. Kaseya absorbs Datto for $6.200 billion.
This deal brought together Kaseya's security technology with the disaster recovery capabilities of Datto, a company that had already been around a lot. It raised $100 million as a startup before being acquired by Vista Equity in 2017. The private equity firm took it public in 2020 before selling it to Kaseya earlier this year.
8. Thoma Bravo adds Sailpoint for $6.900 billion.
Thoma Bravo was busy in 2022, kicking off a year of big spending on identity software with the acquisition of identity security company Sailpoint in April. She would later buy a couple of adjacent pieces, including Ping Identity for $2.800 billion in August and ForgeRock for $2.300 billion in October.
7. Thoma Bravo acquires Coupa for 8.000 million dollars.
Coupa isn't exactly a household name in business software, but it specializes in spend management, something every business needs to do. Before the sale, activist investors took the unusual step of responding to rumors of a possible sale, believing that the company was undervalued and the time to sell was not optimal. However, when Thoma Bravo made an offer, the board approved the operation. It remains to be seen if the same investors will try to rally others to block it when it comes time for shareholder voting in the new year.
6. Vista Equity acquires Avalara for $8.400 billion.
This is another transaction involving a lesser-known business software company specializing in tax compliance. It's not sexy, but it's certainly necessary for finance departments. This deal is Vista's first in the top 10 this year, though it won't be the last for the active investment firm.
