While we’re still in the UK, we have a special report here by John Simpson, our VP at the British HQ, and Jon Scott, our Senior VP in Europe. John?

John Simpson

Yes, thank you Bruce. This is John Simpson and I wanted to talk about some of the chief points about the UK recently. The Atego deal that Nat announced is certainly the most recent deal we have done in the UK, but Corum has a long history there. Last year, for example, we sold Resonate Knowledge Technologies to OpenText, and have done deals in mobile workforce scheduling, 3D design, consumer content and many other sectors.

Jon Scott

We’ve also had a very active events schedule, with an exclusive Private Equity/Venture Capital breakfast earlier this year, the largest ever World Financial Symposiums Growth and Exits conference in June, and we’ll be holding events in Reading, Edinburgh and London coming up.

John Simpson

The tech M&A scene in the UK is certainly moving quickly, with more deals done in Q2 than any other quarter since 2012. Notably, 54% of all announced deals in the UK this year have been cross-border, and 81% of those have been with a US acquirer.

Jon Scott

That US acquirer component is certainly worth noting, but the largest UK software deal this year was Zynga’s January acquisition of Oxford-based social-mobile game maker Natural Motion and their popular “Clumsy Ninja” for a half-billion dollars. The 7.6x revenue multiple is the highest valuation multiple of the year so far as well.

John Simpson

Absolutely, and while gaming saw the largest single deal, Financial Services was the top vertical. Equifax acquired debt collection and revenue management SaaS firm TDX out of Nottingham for $327M, a 3.6x revenue multiple. Financial information and services company Markit bought fellow Londoner thinkFolio for its portfolio management software for investment professionals.

Jon Scott

We continue to be extremely active in the UK; I have a client that is about to go into an LOI, so we’re looking forward to more announcements in the coming months, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on that. Bruce, back to you.

Bruce Milne

Thank you Jon and John. That’s interesting, 81% of the cross-border buyers of UK companies are from the US. We’re seeing that across the industries, as we’ll see now in our research report, with Elon’s team. Elon Gasper is our VP and director of research. Elon?