Why Would Investment Bankers Embrace Social Media During a Downturn?

I was thrilled to be asked by Bob London, a friend of 2i, to offer my perspective on the effect of the recession on my investment banking practice. You can read the article in Bob’s Executive Perspectives Blog or below.

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Filed Under Business Models, Intangible Assets, Internet Company, Internet Trends & Drivers, Recession

Internet-Reliant Sector M&A Activity and Insights

Intangible Insights analyzes the Internet industry by functional area and by vertical. The functional areas, which we believe represent the vast majority, if not all, Internet-Reliant companies, are categorized using standard industry definitions for Content & Media, Applications, Merchandising, and Offline Service (not included in the index). We try to include pure play companies for each functional category in the 2i Stock Index, but some companies cross functional boundaries (e.g. Amazon, which generates significant merchandising revenue through the sale of third-party products but also has viable and growing revenue from its Amazon Web Services, an application function.) We include these firms because of their industry leading status.

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Filed Under Business Valuation, Internet Company, Internet Trends & Drivers, Internet Valuation, Merger & Acquisitions, Q1 2009 Internet M&A Report, Q1 2009 M&A Report

Part 4 of 2I’s Quarterly Internet and Digital Media M&A Report is an appendix of supporting information for our research posted in the first three sections of the Report.

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Filed Under Business Valuation, Internet Trends & Drivers, Internet Valuation, Merger & Acquisitions, Q1 2009 Internet M&A Report, Q1 2009 M&A Report, Valuation Metrics

Overall M&A Activity

Clearly M&A transactions have slowed substantially during the last two quarters, with Q1-2009 being the slowest quarter for deal closings over the past 12 quarters.  First quarter 2009 M&A activity is off 39% when compared to the recent peak of Q2 2007.  However, if we stop and recognize that M&A transactions were getting completed at a historically blistering rate in 2007, we gain a bit of perspective.  In fact, with all of the doom and gloom and economic meltdown, it is astonishing to see that M&A activity in Q1-2009 was off only 16% when compared to a more moderate time of M&A in Q2&3 2006. We fully expect that Q2-2009 also will be slow, but we’re starting to see signs that the last two quarters of 2009 could possibly be more active than the first two.  With a 6-8 month cycle for typical transactions getting completed, look to the first two quarters of 2010 to be back at a pace more in line with historical averages.

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Filed Under Business Valuation, Internet Company, Internet Trends & Drivers, Merger & Acquisitions