K N OW WH AT T E L E C OM S A R E L O O K I N G F O R 1
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A key aspect of understanding your company’s value and laying the foundation for a productive acquisition negotiation process is knowing telecoms’ acquisition trends, strategic focus, and business targets.
than telecoms and companies whose solutions enable reaching strategic goals. Telecoms continue to push for the so-called ‘quad-play’ services, where broadband internet, television, wireless, and landline phones are offered to customers as bundled deals. However, quad-play is for many being replaced by ‘x-play’ as telecoms look across other adjacent industries, such as technology, media, and entertainment, to capture growth opportunities. Big data and data analytics are other areas of great interest to telecoms that have vast stores of customer data but have struggled to leverage it for business insights and new services. Finally, telecoms are betting heavily on new 5G networks and related services and will be looking with great interest at targets that enable them to speed up development and deployment further.
infrastructure is a sign of growing demand, as is also the case for specialised teleconferencing software for remote schooling and work environments. Companies in both spaces will be of interest to telecoms. Companies that can increase automation, virtualisation and intelligence throughout telecoms’ networks are of particular interest. Their prevalence on telecoms’ wish list is partly connected with a strategic focus on trying to take advantage of business opportunities tied to the networked economy, which has received even more attention in the wake of Covid-19 due to demands for accelerating digital transformation. Other particularly prominent target segments include companies that have brought complementary or competing products or solutions to market faster
These trends are good news for software companies looking at potentially being acquired.Telecomswill want to avoid disruptions and target firms that can help grow technical abilities. Already before Covid-19, telecoms companies were busy looking outside of their traditional sphere of interest, with software one of the preferred spaces for acquisition plays. This includes everyone from smaller telecoms to giants such as Verizon and AT&T. Telecoms are focused on software companies in a range of sub-industries and seem particularly interested in mid-market and SME companies in the software space. Excellent opportunities for bolt-on acquisitions, augmenting existing services and solutions (mainly through SMEs), and expanding service portfolios (mainly through mid-market acquisitions) are driving factors. Expected increases in IT spending focused on cloud
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