A Blog from Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital on “Maximizing Enterprise Value” for technology, life science, medical device and cleantech companies and their Intellectual Property
M&A deal activity continued to slow through the fourth quarter but has primarily impacted mega-deals rather than SME businesses. The total deal count in technology M&A came in at 1,005 deals and $75.6B in total publicly available deal value, down from the 1,229 deals and $221.3B in total deal value in Q4 of 2021. While public equity markets have fallen, competition for tuck-in acquisitions has maintained valuations for small software and services vendors. Acquisitions of Western European software firms valued less than $500M rose from 3.4x trailing revenue in 2021 to 4.1x in 2022. The competition for small firms should keep valuations steady in 2023. Still, as we turned the page from extremely high valuations in 2021, 2022 has shown us that quality firms can still receive great multiples, albeit a far cry from the 20x revenues we saw a year ago.
DecisionPoint advised on 3 deals during the fourth quarter. In November, DecisionPoint advised Ongoing Operations on their sale to Trellance and Agreement Express’ payment division on their sale to NMI. In December, we completed our final deal of the year, advising Agreement Express’ wealth management onboarding division’s sale to Advisor360.
Q4 2022 ViewPoint Released
Our Quarterly ViewPoint for the quarter ended December 31, 2022, has been released. The ViewPoint is a summary of trends, stock index performances, public valuation multiples, and relevant M&A activity in the services, software, and communications sectors.
Tom H. Wilson, Jr.Managing PartnerDecisionPointo: 704.248.1124 m: 704.560.1415 f: 704.943.5254
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