As part of my fantabulous week off, I caught up on some reading that had been sitting in my “to read” email folder.
Nine months ago I posted a chart of the top large cap M&A buyers from 2004 through spring 2005. I thought I’d revisit this list with the top 16 technology acquirers from 2003 through January 2006 courtesy of America’s Growth Capital. The companies are listed in order of acquisitiveness with the number of acquisitions over the period listed in ( )’s.
IBM (28)
Cisco (28)
IAC (16)
Symantec (16)
Hewlett-Packard (16)
Yahoo! (15)
Oracle (14)
Verisign (14)
Ebay (13)
CA (11)
Google (11)
Infor (11)
Broadcom (10)
EMC (10)
Intel (10)
Microsoft (10)
When you extend the period and include the balance of 2005, SAP, Sun, and Juniper fall of the previous list. In addition, there’s been plenty of M&A activity in February and March to date (e.g. Google acquiring Writely and Boulder’s very own @Last) which reshuffles things a little in the middle of the pack.