Brenon Daly oversees the financial analysis of the Market Insight and KnowledgeBase products at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, having covered more than a quarter-trillion dollars' worth of deal flow for both national publications and research firms.
Brenon began his career in 1991 as one of the initial reporters at Prognosis, the first English-language newspaper in the former Eastern Bloc. While there, he covered the Czech Republic's transition to a market economy, as well as larger financial stories across the region. Brenon moved to Vienna in 1995 to run the local bureau for United Press International. In addition to reporting extensively on Austrian politics and economics, he also coordinated and edited EuroBusiness stories from correspondents in Slovakia and Hungary. After UPI, Brenon moved to an analyst position with the Economist Group, where he researched and wrote reports for The Economist Intelligence Unit and the regional publication of The Economist.
Returning to the US in 1997, Brenon helped establish the editorial voice in the early days of financial news site CBS MarketWatch. During his time there, he helped launch OptionsWatch, covering options trading, and MarketPulse, a minute-by-minute report on stock activity licensed primarily to brokerages. Since 2000, Brenon has focused his reporting on M&A as a reporter for The Deal. During that time, he also sharpened his analytical skills, writing reports for TechDealmaker (since acquired by 451 Research) and the boutique research firm Intellectual Capital Associates.
COVID-19 locked down bankers and locked up the tech M&A market for a bit of 2020, but the deals are flowing freely again. That's the overwhelmingly upbeat forecast from a special 451 Research survey of some of the tech industry's busiest bankers. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents expect little to no impact from the pandemic on dealmaking this year.
One of the favorite observations that echoed around the tech industry in 2020 was that the pandemic accelerated changes that companies had been considering, pulling forward years of transformation into mere months. It turns out that's also one of the key reasons why spending on M&A in the tech industry soared to the record level it did last year.
An unimaginable rebound from a decade-low performance to the highest-ever level played out not only in the tech M&A market, but also in the stock market. Both rode a surge of confidence that tech would not just make it through the pandemic, but come out ahead. How come that confidence isn't coming through in IT budgets?
A trillion-dollar run rate. Astonishingly, that's where the tech M&A market left off in 2020. After plummeting in the early days of the pandemic, spending on acquisitions soared. The late shopping spree pushed the value of deals announced in just the second half of last year higher than virtually all other full-year totals in our database.
In a year dominated by a global health emergency that no one saw coming, 2020 also notched a record that virtually no one saw coming: Tech M&A spending last year soared to its highest level since the dot-com collapse. Astonishingly, almost impossibly, the total value of tech and telecom transactions announced around the plague-ravaged world in 2020 topped $600bn for the first time in history.
Wall Street investors actively bought shares of C3.ai, even as the company's customers have slowed their buying of its AI software. C3.ai's stunningly strong IPO shows that the market is banking on a rebound " one that our own research indicates is likely for this emerging technology.
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