Love is in the air, and it isn’t just for Valentine’s Day couples.  Corporations have been canoodling one another in attempts to form a union. The recent turmoil in the capital markets and the heavy accumulation of corporate cash have created grand opportunities. According to The Street, we could be in a merger and acquisition boom. Not only are banks willing to start lending more, but acquirers will pay premiums for companies they truly adore-ones that can help them expand their distribution channels.  However, other thought leaders think differently.  Ernst and Young feels that the technology markets won’t be able to keep up the pace of 2011 M&A activity.  What is the future for tech in 2012? Is their cash left to burn? How will the top recent acquisitions settle once the honeymoon phase is over? And are ones their size repeatable?

Is M&A Love Repeatable? 3 Big 2011 Acquisitions Just Settling:

$12.5B: Just this week the US department of Justice approved Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Google’s interest in Motorola was largely around its patents, all of which help protect the Android in legal battles.

$11B: HP acquisition of Autonomy (UK). This deal was the largest in the European tech sector giving HP new customer accounts as well as new ways to “manage and extract data.”

$3.4B: SAP bought cloud computing software Success Factors, mainly to keep up with Oracle. In this case, buying was far faster than building.

These price tags may not buy love, but they certainly increase its bargaining power. Curious about “selling out” yourself? To learn about the future of start-up M&A activity come to our Strategy Session in Los Angeles March 6^th.  We’ll discuss acquisition strategies from both sides of the deal.