Deal season returns. Several large M&A deals currently attract a lot attention, and they will shape the world. The first is Salesforce, one of top five software companies in the world, will buy Slack, the firm creating a popular collaboration software. The deal value can be $27 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions in recent years.
The second deal is the Bertelsmann’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster, the fifth-biggest English-language book publisher by revenues, from ViacomCBS, for $2.2bn. Because Bertelsmann is the parent of Penguin Random House, the largest publisher by a big margin, the deal will increase the concentration of the industry.
The News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media group and the owner of HarperCollins (the third largest publisher), joined the bid but failed.
ViacomCBS sold Simon & Schuster because it wants to focus on it streaming service, Paramount+.
BTW, currently, the second largest publisher is Hachette Livre, owned by Lagardère, an ailing French conglomerate. (Vivendi, a French group that is Lagardère’s biggest shareholder, also briefly vied for Simon & Schuster.)
The last one is the S&P Global, a big financial data firm, pays $44bn for its rival IHS Markit. Don’t forget that Last year the London Stock Exchange (LSE) agreed to buy Refinitiv, the former financial-data service of Thomson Reuters, for $27bn.
You can listen to the podcast below from Economist.com to get to know more about those deals.
