Full Year 2020 Private Equity Industry Trends

2020 Key Highlights 

The Information Industry’s most active financial sponsor either directly or through an affiliated business in 2020 was Thoma Bravo with 35 transactions.

Thoma Bravo was also responsible for the industry’s largest sponsored deal during the year with the acquisition of Real Page, which offers property and real estate management software for multifamily, single-family, senior-living, commercial, and other uses, for $9.77 billion.

Insight Venture Partners completed the largest sponsored deal in the Infrastructure segment in 2020 with the acquisition of Veeam Software, a cloud-focused backup and disaster recovery services provider, for $5 billion.

2020 Key Trends

Total transaction volume in 2020 decreased by 14 percent over 2019, from 1,014 to 872. On a half year basis, M&A activity improved 27 percent in 2nd Half 2020 over 1st Half 2020, from 384 to 488.

Total transaction value in 2020 declined by 16 percent over 2019, from $101.46 billion to $85.14 billion. On a half year basis, M&A value more than doubled in 2nd Half 2020 over 1st Half 2020, from $24.58 billion to $60.56 billion.

The median revenue multiple moved downward from 3.5x in 2019 to 3.2x in 2020. The median EBITDA multiple rose from 14.1x in 2019 to 17.2x in 2020.

M&A Market Overview

Berkery Noyes tracked 2,796 private equity transactions in the Information Industry between 2018 and 2020, of which 305 disclosed financial terms, and calculated the aggregate value to be $197.89 billion. Based on known transaction values, we project values of 2,491 undisclosed transactions to be $82.34 billion, totaling $280.23 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 3.1x revenue and 14.5x EBITDA.