The value of the ten biggest tech sector deals, notably spread around the world, topped $85 billion in November, with more than half the value coming from one mega-merger on the last day of the month.
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Business information provider S&P Global agreed to pay $44 billion in stock to acquire rival IHS Markit—the year’s biggest acquisition that’s set to create a new business and Wall Street data juggernaut.
The two companies said they expected to have the necessary regulatory approvals to complete the deal in the second half of 2021, however, the tie-up is likely to be reviewed extensively by antitrust regulators who closely scrutinized the London Stock Exchange’s $27-billion acquisition of financial data provider Refinitiv last year.
S&P Global and IHS Markit said their businesses had very limited overlap, with the merger combining S&P Global’s credit ratings, market intelligence businesses and stock and energy benchmarks with IHS Markit’s fixed income benchmarks and indices, bond pricing and reference data, and information on the natural resources, automotive and engineering sectors.
The deal, expected to generate annual free cash flow of over $5 billion by 2023 that the companies said will allow them to invest more than $1 billion in technological advances, puts pressure on rivals Bloomberg, Moody’s, Intercontinental Exchange, and Factset.
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By GlobalDataEarlier in the month, Cellnex Telecom agreed to buy CK Hutchison Holdings’s European telecommunication towers for around $11.8 billion, the biggest ever acquisition by the Spanish mast operator and topping off a year that’s seen Cellnex do two acquisition deals in Portugal, a deal to enter Poland and a deal in France.
In China, internet giant Baidu moved to acquire Joyy’s live-streaming service YY Live for $3.6 billion in an all-cash deal, signaling Baidu, sometimes called the Google of China, is further looking to diversify beyond its core search business and catch up with rivals in video entertainment.
