1st Half 2020 Online & Mobile Industry Trends

1ST HALF 2020 KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Three of the industry’s top five largest deals in 1st Half 2020 occurred in the finance vertical: Morgan Stanley’s announced acquisition of E-Trade, an online brokerage company, for $13.13 billion; Intuit’s announced acquisition of Credit Karma, a personal finance company that offers free credit reports, scores, and insights, for $7.1 billion; and Visa’s announced acquisition of Plaid Technologies, which develops and creates API’s for banking data, for $5.3 billion.

There were 274 financially sponsored transactions with an aggregate value of $17.29 billion, representing 20 percent of the total volume and 22 percent of the total value, respectively.

1ST HALF 2020 KEY TRENDS

Total transaction volume in 1st Half 2020 decreased seven percent over 2nd Half 2019, from 1,483 to 1,382.

Total transaction value in 1st Half 2020 fell by 48 percent over 2nd Half 2019, from $149.78 billion to $78.57 billion. However, value stayed relatively constant compared to 1st Half 2019.

The median revenue multiple shifted declined from 2.8x in 2nd Half 2019 to 2.2x in 1st Half 2020. The median EBITDA multiple moved downward from 15.3x in 2nd Half 2019 to 12.5x in 1st Half 2020.

M&A MARKET OVERVIEW

Berkery Noyes tracked 7,503 Online & Mobile transactions between 2018 and 1st Half 2020, of which 1,320 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate transaction value to be $390.46 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 6,183 undisclosed transactions to be $128.54 billion, totaling $519 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past two and a half years.

Transactions from 1st Half 2018 to 1st Half 2020 with enterprise values above $160 million received a median revenue multiple of 4.5x, whereas those in the $20-160 million range garnered a median revenue multiple of 2.9x and those in the $10-$20 million range had a median revenue multiple of 1.7x.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 30 months were 2.5x revenue and 12.6x EBITDA.