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The newly published IT & Business Services M&A Report from Hampleton Partners reveals an uptick in deal activity and valuations for the sector, singling out cloud computing as a “significant driver of market growth, with businesses and public sector organisations seeking out cloud migration and digital transformation services to modernize their IT infrastructures and implement mission-critical software”.

The significance of cloud migration as a momentum generator has been underscored by recent IT sector studies showing that the percentage of IT infrastructure hosted “on-premises” by businesses and other organisations is set to shrink as they look to save on resources by outsourcing to hyperscalers – the large cloud providers which take on the burden of IT processing and storage tasks.

The latest Autotech & Mobility M&A report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, reveals a resurgence of energy in the sector, with dealmaking growing after a temporary decline in the first half of 2024.

Increased transactions, and the fact that valuation multiples have remained consistent, indicate renewed investor confidence following a period of caution stemming from macroeconomic and regulatory pressures. This momentum is expected to build in 2025, with new caps on vehicular carbon emissions spurring the electric vehicle market in Europe, and demand for cutting-edge on-board software continuing to grow.

The newest Enterprise Software M&A report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, has revealed a surge in dealmaking in the sector, with transactions in the second half of last year up by 18% from the previous reporting period.

Commenting on the key trends fuelling deal volume, Miro Parizek, founder and Senior Partner at Hampleton Partners, said: “Transaction volumes in the sector, which have been consistently robust since the beginning of the decade, increased in the second half of last year. In total we tracked 1,981 transactions in 2024 with disclosed value of $153 billion.”

The latest IT & Business Services M&A report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, reveals an uptick in both deal activity and the median EBITDA multiple for the sector.

This follows a drop in transaction numbers seen in 1H2024, which was likely due to both macroeconomic headwinds and a normalisation of deal activity following the M&A surge seen during pandemic.

The new Digital Commerce M&A report from Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies, reveals that 2H2024 was the second consecutive six-month period to see a rise in dealmaking. However, buyers remain cautious and highly profit-conscious when selecting acquisition targets, with transaction numbers continuing to lag markedly behind what was seen during the feeding frenzy of the pandemic years.  

Hampleton Partners’ Digital Commerce expert Ralph Hübner said: “Our latest market data confirms that deal flow is steadily recovering in the Digital Commerce space, although the pace of the resurgence has been kept in check by the lingering effects of recent macroeconomic headwinds.. We now see again transactions in all kind of deal sizes and a wider spread of multiples. Especially the agency and IT-services sector is back and will remain very busy.”

For a long time now, quantum computing’s status as a new technology has mirrored quantum mechanical phenomena itself. That is to say, it’s been both happening and not happening: seemingly suspended in a superposition of being about to change absolutely everything, and being the impractical plaything of scientists, investors and futurists. This tantalising ambiguity has led to much talk of it being “overhyped” or even “Silicon Valley’s longest-running hoax”.

Justified though the scepticism around the hype cycle has been, the general consensus is that we are indeed on the verge of a paradigm shift in computing, with companies having recently made tangible steps forward when it comes to harnessing the power of qubits – the units of quantum information which, unlike classical binary bits, can occupy positions between 0 and 1. One of the most notable moments came in December, when Google unveiled its “Willow” quantum chip, reportedly capable of being able to solve in five minutes a problem which would require a classical computer 10 septillion years to complete.

Hampleton Partners has advised a thyssenkrupp company on a strategic acquisition as part of a buy-side target search program. thyssenkrupp Materials Services, one of the world's leading independent materials distributors and supply chain service providers, has acquired WAVES, a leading provider of sustainability management platforms based in Luxembourg. The acquisition is an important step in expanding the sustainability product range of pacemaker, the AI subsidiary of thyssenkrupp Materials Services. As a pioneer in the field of sustainable, AI-supported supply chain solutions, pacemaker supports companies on their way to a transparent supply chain. The acquisition underlines the company's commitment to supporting its customers in their sustainability goals. The project was led on the part of Hampleton by Konstantin Kastius, Managing Director and Oliver Rupps, Sector Principal Logistics and Digital Supply Chain.

 

One of the first eye-catching deal announcements of 2025 has come from credit rating and loan referral company ClearScore, which has acquired fellow fintech firm Aro Finance. Based in Manchester, Aro is a credit broker which embeds its marketplace platform within the digital infrastructure of clients such as Argos, Very and Asda. This allows customers to obtain personal credit and other financial products and services while they shop for, say, clothes and groceries.

The purchase represents a major expansion by ClearScore into the B2B2C sphere, and also underscores the surging appeal of embedded finance propositions to acquirers and investors. Back in 2020, TechCrunch published an article suggesting that “embedded finance might represent fintech’s future” and that “every tech company is potentially a fintech company”. All the signs are that this trend is now going from strength to strength.

As 2025 progresses, our analysts will be providing expert commentary on the precise developments within specific tech sectors (you can read our 2024 reports here). But right now, with the year just getting started, it’s a good moment to pause and consider some of the prominent trends which are likely to influence M&A activity over the next 12 months…

The number of global M&A transactions in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) Software sector saw a marked drop in 2024, according to a new market report by Hampleton Partners, the international M&A and corporate finance advisory firm for software and technology companies.

There were 60 deals recorded, the lowest number seen in the sector during a six-month period since before the pandemic. As the report shows, M&A activity surged between 2020 and 2023, reflecting global demand among businesses for SCM solutions which could minimise the disruption to logistics triggered by the pandemic and other geopolitical crises.

While this M&A momentum has slackened in 2024, it likely represents a temporary lull brought about by macroeconomic headwinds and investor caution, rather than the start of a long-lasting downturn in the SCM sector.