Full Year 2018 Online & Mobile Industry Trends

2018 Key Highlights

• Four of the industry’s top ten largest deals in 2018 occurred in the E-Commerce segment.
• Along these lines were Walmart’s acquisition of a majority stake in Flipkart Online Services, an e-commerce marketplace based in India, for $16 billion; Alibaba Group’s announced acquisition of Ele.me, an online delivery and local services platform in China, for $5.42 billion; Chinese e-commerce platform Meituan’s announced acquisition of Mobike, a bike sharing company that allows users of its mobile app to reserve and unlock bikes, for $3.4 billion; and SilverLake’s announced acquisition of ZPG, the owner of property website Zoopla, for $3.34 billion.

2018 Key Trends

• Total transaction volume in 2018 increased by three percent over 2017, from 2,906 to 2,989.
• Strategic volume in 2018 remained about constant over 2017, at 2,380. Private equity backed volume improved 20 percent during this timeframe, from 507 to 609.
• Total transaction value in 2018 almost doubled over 2017, from $104.98 billion to $205.95 billion. This represented a 15 percent increase relative to 2016.
• The median revenue multiple increased from 2.0x in 2017 to 2.5x in 2018. The median EBITDA moved upward from 11.5x  in 2017 to 12.1x in 2018.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 8,811 Online & Mobile transactions between 2016 and 2018, of which 1,810 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $368.90 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 7,001 undisclosed transactions to be $118.72 billion, totaling $487.63 billion worth of transactions tracked over the past three years.

Disclosed median enterprise value multiples for all segments combined in this report during the last 36 months were 2.2x revenue and 11.8x EBITDA.