March saw the lowest number of European TMT deals in just over a year with 214 transactions announced, according to latest data from corporate finance firm Regent Partners. There were only a few very large deals – all in the telecoms space – and as a result the rolling 3 month average value of deals dropped to $18.1 billion. However, valuation multiples held steady with the price-earnings (P/E) multiple at 16x and the price-sales (P/S) multiple at 1.4x.
Perhaps the most notable deal in the UK – though not the largest – was the $30 million acquisition of mobile news app developer, Summly, by Yahoo!.UK based Summly was created two years ago by 17 year old Nick D'Aloisio with backing from Horizon Ventures (see Teen dreams of tech). Otherwise there was activity from some of the 'usual suspect' business process services players such as Quindell (see here) and Capita (see here) amongst others.
Eligible TechMarketView subscription service clients can read our regular round-up of corporate activity in the UK software and IT services scene in the next edition of IndustryViews Corporate Activity.