Full Year 2019 Information Industry Trends

2019 Key Highlights

The industry’s largest transaction in 2019 was Thomson Reuters and Blackstone’s sale of Refinitiv, a financial data analytics provider, to the London Stock Exchange for $27 billion.

Strategic acquisitions represented 78 percent of total volume and 65 percent of total value, respectively.

2019 Key Trends

Total transaction volume in 2019 saw a two percent uptick over 2018, from 4,467 to 4,566.

As for the industry’s three horizontal markets, Software volume increased by eight percent; Online & Mobile volume improved  by two percent; and Media & Marketing volume declined by six percent.

Total transaction value in 2019 declined by two percent over 2018, from $380.40 billion to $371.56 billion.

The median revenue multiple moved upward from 2.4x in 2018 to 2.6x in 2019. The median EBITDA multiple shifted slightly from 12.1x in 2018 to 12.3x in 2019.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 13,669 Information Industry transactions between 2017 and 2019, of which 2,630 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $827.20 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 11,039 undisclosed transactions to be $219.52 billion, totaling $1.05 trillion 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 2.3x  revenue and 11.8x EBITDA.

Out of 13,669 deals tracked by Berkery Noyes between 2017 and 2019, transactions valued at $160 million and above garnered a median enterprise value multiple of 3.9x revenue. In contrast, companies with transaction values between $10 million and $20 million captured a median enterprise value multiple of 1.7x revenue.