1st Half 2020 Information Industry Trends

1ST HALF 2020 KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Six of the Information Industry’s top ten highest value deals in 1st Half 2020 were completed by strategic acquirers. These six acquisitions combined accounted for slightly more than one-third of the industry’s aggregate value year-to-date.

There were 381 financially sponsored transactions with an aggregate value of $31.44 billion, representing 20 percent of the total volume and 32 percent of the total value, respectively.

1ST HALF 2020 KEY TRENDS

Total transaction volume in 1st Half 2020 decreased by 12 percent over 2nd Half 2019, from 2,197 to 1,928.

Total transaction value in 1st Half 2020 fell by 60 percent over 2nd Half 2019, from $248.10 billion to $98.25 billion.

As for the industry’s horizontal markets, three of the top five highest value Software deals year-to-date occurred in the Infrastructure segment. The largest of these was Insight Venture Partners’ acquisition of Veeam Software, a cloud-focused backup and disaster recovery services provider, for $5 billion.

The median revenue multiple declined from 2.8x in 2nd Half 2019 to 2.4x in 1st Half 2020. The median EBITDA multiple moved downward from 13.5x in 2nd Half 2019 to 11.3x in 1st Half 2020, returning to its 1st Half 2019 level.

M&A MARKET OVERVIEW

Berkery Noyes tracked 10,967 Information Industry transactions between 2018 and 1st Half 2020, of which 1,945 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate transaction value to be $678.02 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 9,022 undisclosed transactions to be $195.17 billion, totaling $873.19 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past two and a half years.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 30 months were 2.5x revenue and 12.1x EBITDA.

Out of 10,967 transactions tracked by Berkery Noyes in this report, we found that 2,318 financially sponsored transactions accounted for 21 percent of the total transactions, yet they totaled $312.20 billion, representing 36 percent of aggregate transaction value.