Takeovers in software business - Recap and days to come

Abstract

The article summarizes the last 30 years of the M&A market in the software industry. The authors verify a hypothesis if the takeover strategy is still effective and promising. A dataset of over 18,000 transactions was analyzed. It has been noticed that while company valuations and the S&P 500 index have been increasing over the last decade, the frequency of transactions in the software industry has decreased. One of the few countries that have increased its market share in the last decade was China. Moreover, compared to the dotcom bubble, the number of transactions decreased, while the average deal value increased significantly. Implications and research directions for the software market are also provided in this paper.