Dear Clients & Friends,
Below is a link to our May 2012 Market Update. As you will see, it provides our sense of M&A values, activity and trends for the dozen plus technology, information and healthcare sectors that we follow.
Click here for our Market Update
This month we saw multiple transactions announced with, again, many transactions well under $200M. One of these involved our client, Ideas International, which has agreed to be acquired by Gartner, a leading global source of information and research. Ideas International is a leading independent supplier of IT market research, based in Hornsby, Australia, and represents our first sale of a publicly traded company in Australia. This reinforces our belief that strategics and financial sponsors continue to show a willingness to pay reasonable values for firms that show scale, growth, and a prominent position in the marketplace, but have little appetite for mega-deals.
A few of the notable deals:
- Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) agreed to acquire Demandforce for $423.5M, and additionally acquired AisleBuyer for an undisclosed amount;
- Nasdaq OMX acquired NOS Clearing for NOK 230M ($40M);
- Freepoint Commodities agreed to acquire J.P. Morgan Metals & Concentrates Trading Unit;
- Google acquired TxVia;
- CoStar Group (Nasdaq: CSGP) acquired LoopNet for $762M;
- Danaher Corporation (NYSE: DHR) to acquire X-Rite (Nasdaq:XRIT) for $625M;
- Dassault Systemes (EPA:DSY) agreed to acquire Gemcom Software International for €272M ($360M);
- MICROS (Nasdaq:MCRS) Systems agreed to acquire Torex Retail Holdings for £162.5M ($270M);
- Kinnser Software raised $40M From Insight Venture Partners in Series A Round;
- Gartner Australasia agreed to acquire Ideas International (ASX: IDE) for AUD 20M ($21.16M);
- WhiteGlove House Call Health raised $12.9M in a Series E Round;
- 3M acquired CodeRyte for an undisclosed price; and
- IBM agreed to acquire Vivisimo.
As you will see in the report, a few of the largest deals were consummated by public strategic acquirers. As examples: CoStar acquired online real estate marketplace LoopNet, Intuit acquired small-business application developer Demandforce and virtual shopping assistant AisleBuyer, and Dassault purchased mining software provider Gemcom.
Several of the deals fell within the financial technology sector, where activity remains robust. Nasdaq OMX acquired NOS Clearing, Google acquired TxVia, and Freepoint Commodities agreed to acquire JP Morgan’s Metals and Contentrates Trading Unit. We expect the significant activity in all sectors to continue within the small/middle market. As rates continue to hit record lows – Companies around the world are looking to use the over $1 Trillion corporate cash to acquire products services, capability, technology, geography, revenue and EBITDA that they are otherwise finding difficult to achieve organically.
We hope you will find this month’s newsletter useful. We are always available to answer questions.