There s a whole lotta hand-shaking going on in Silicon Valley and beyond these days.
Big companies are buying smaller companies at breakneck speed and paying out more money in deals of stratospheric proportions, setting up 2014 as the biggest year for mergers and acquisitions than any time since the Great Recession, according to a new report from research and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
For the first half of 2014, companies across the country paid out $982 billion in mergers and acquisitions, the most since the first half of 2007 and up from up from $570 billion for the same period in 2013. The number of deals, however, remained the same between the first half of 2013 and 2014, according to the report.
Silicon Valley has seen a surge of tech acquisitions, the latest announced on Monday, with real estate website operator Zillow buying San Francisco-based Truila for $3.5 billion. Many of the big deals have been between tech companies, as giants Facebook, Yahoo and Google continue to acquire smaller firms to acquire new talent and snatch up startups whose new technology may pose a competitive threat. Apple, for instance, is reportedly on the hunt for more content acquisitions, most recently with the purchase of reading recommendation app BookLamp.
Last year, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Faceboook, Twitter, Cisco and Mill Valley-based Autodesk ranked among the top 10 acquirers of private tech companies, according to a report by PrivCo.
The price tag continue to go up on deals, too, with almost half this year valued at $10 billion or more, according to PwC. A few deals were more than $50 billion, including Time Warner Cable/Comcast and DirecTV/AT&T. And far more deals are being done with foreign companies, as U.S. firms spent $308 billion in mergers and acquisitions overseas, more than triple the amount in 2013.
Illustration by Andrew Lucas/Orange Country Register/MCT archives
