What's next for M&A?

Here’s a cool chart from The Economist showing all of the deals that the big tech companies have done over the last decade. Interestingly, the last three multi-billion dollar acquisitions were all Microsoft and Amazon deals.

Last week, Amazon announced another big deal, acquiring Zoox, an autonomous driving startup, for $1.2B. According to Pitchbook, Amazon has acquired two other companies this year (DataRow and Sye), and Microsoft has acquired five (Affirmed Networks, Metaswitch, Softomotive, CyberX, and ADRM Software).

Earlier this year when markets were down, I was expecting to see more big acquisitions by the big tech companies, but with the “V-shaped” recovery for technology stocks (SaaS multiples are at all-time highs), 2020 will probably look more like 2019, where we primarily saw small to mid-size deals.

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