Now before we take a look at our predictions for 2017, let’s revisit our predictions for 2016. How’d we do, Tim?
Timothy Goddard
We did pretty well. We missed on a few of them. Food ordering did not move into gaming. Apple went the AI route rather than to IoT or Enterprise, though they could still jump into either one of those from AI and we’ll see if they do. And meanwhile, Indian product M&A stayed stable.
We got some right. PE didn’t buy any of the companies that we mentioned specifically, but they did make two Internet megadeals, which is unheard of. These are old line PE firms buying Allegro, the eBay of Poland, and Hotelbets.com.
We didn’t see consumer traction in gaming, which we predicted, and there wasn’t much in sports or viral videos, but there was some. It was certainly more than gaming, especially at that entry-level space with Samsung Gear, Google Cardboard, that sort of thing, so we gave ourselves partial credited for both of those.
But there were three that we really did nail. Drone software M&A really did kick off. The Redbird analytics deal is a landmark in that space and we’ll address that a bit more later. And we think we’ll see more of that in the year to come.
We saw Ctrip acquire Skyscanner out of Scotland in a megadeal, and that’s definitely hits on Internet giants buying European travel sites.
And then the one where we would give ourselves an 11 if we could, vehicles, not houses or cities, really became the central hub of IoT, and they did drive a global M&A wave with multiple megadeals.
We’ll be talking a lot more about that today as well.
But what about this year?
Well, first, we think that Amazon is going to make an unusual acquisition. This is an easy one, and privately we make this prediction all the time. Privately we say that there’s nothing Amazon could buy that would surprise us, so we figured this year we’d make it official.
We think we’ll see GE extend its shopping spree, and we’ll dig more into that later. We think they’re going to break into the top three as they reinvent themselves into a tech company.
We’ll see more block chain acquisitions by traditional fintech and finance firms.
The repatriation that Bruce mentioned, we think that that will finally lead to some unicorn acquisitions.
Sovereign funds: Bruce mentioned these as well, we think these guys will cut out the middle man and step into a more direct role, at least some of them, maybe the Saudis or the Norwegians, we’ll see what happens.
We will see major AI players move into data security.
And we will see more industrial deals like GE and Siemens as well, doing Iot, SDM and similar deals. A lot more of these non-tech buyers will keep moving in.
We will see at least one, probably more, tech firms move into the connected car space. Many have already, but we think more will move in this year as well.
Bruce Milne
Those are some great predictions.