Ever since Covid outbreak, most of us have been involved in managing our homes and offices with a constant track on the number of cases in our regions. Work from home has resulted in a boom time for online meeting platforms with everyone from MS-Teams, Google Meet and Zoom reporting multi-fold increase in revenues. Zoom's share price have skyrocketed from ~$100 to more than $400 in last 6 months, however, all these news items have been widely reported and almost universally known.
What has missed the media radar are the acquisitions made by large tech-firms. Microsoft and Apply have made 6-7 acquisitions each since the pandemic began. Experts predict that Covid will accelerate digital transformation and adoption of tech products in daily life and tech companies are reportedly taking advantage of compressed valuations due to the pandemic to buy companies cheaply. In fact, even IT services firms have been active in acquiring companies eg, India's Infosys acquired Guidevision and Kaleidoscope recently. Several other IT services firms are in advanced stage of discussions with smaller firms. Microsoft and Apple have been especially active and Q2’20 was in the top 5 quarters for Apple purchases on record, at 5 acquisitions.
Apple has acquired 8 companies this year and 7 since the start of the Covid-19 crisis in February 2020. The scope of acquisitions have also been pretty wide ranging from weather app Dark Sky, speech recognition startup Voysis, and VR event streaming company NextVR.
Apple having missed out on work from home Covid bonanza, in August 2020 acquired Spaces, a startup focused on virtual reality experiences that recently added Zoom-based VR functionality to its product to help enhance the remote work era. The company spun out of DreamWorks Animation in 2016.
Not to be left behind, Google after the failure of Google Glass acquired a Canadian firm North, to help it develop consumer smart glasses. Earlier in the year(before Covid), it had acquired Appsheet, a no-code mobile-application-building platform.
Microsoft has also made 7 purchases since the beginning of the pandemic. Having tasted success of cloud computing especially enhanced usage of Azure Platform and MS Teams, the tech giant’s acquisitions have focused mainly on enterprise technology like cloud security or IT software development — for example, it acquired Massachusetts-based 5G cloud startup Affirmed Networks in March, IoT cybersecurity startup CyberX in June, and UK-based RPA provider Softomotive in May.
Not to be left behind, Amazon splurged $1.2 Bn in June to acquire the self-driving vehicle company Zoox in June. Cisco has also been active having acquired network intelligence specialist ThousandEyes in May for an undisclosed amount.
Finally, the biggest announcement has been NVIDIA announcement to Acquire Arm for $40 Billion, Creating one of the World’s largest computer chip firm.
So, as the saying goes "within every crisis lies an opportunity, depending on how it is looked at" and Covid has provided a perfect opportunity to the smart guys in the technology firms.
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