Report: IT & Business Services
Current Trends and Figures

We tracked one of the highest half-year volume of M&A activity on record in the IT Services sector with 761 acquisitions disclosed in the second half of 2023.

While the volumes have reached a record level, valuation metrics have inched downward; however, there remains a wide variation in valuation multiples due to a variety of factors including growth rates, profitability, geography, domain expertise, and service offerings.

Many IT adoption trends are still broadly in line with the shift from buying technology to building, composing and assembling technology to meet specific business drivers. This shift is foundational to the growth of cloud over on-premises for new IT spending.

Overall, these transformative changes to IT spending mean acquirers remain keen to build out their new cloud capabilities through acquisitions involving as little hardware as possible. This has translated into sustained M&A activity throughout and since Covid peaks, with a slight dip in profitability multiples as acquirers become more selective with their investments and M&A criteria.