merger and acquisitions news | largest acquisition in history

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merger and acquisitions news | largest acquisition in history

On January 18, social media exploded with the news of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision in one of the largest deals ever, whether in the world of games or technology in general. What upset the scales for many companies, the most important of which was Microsoft, of course.

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After this acquisition that changed the game balance and made Microsoft at the top in the field of games, we had the following question, was this historical acquisition the only one of its kind that was this big? What about other acquisitions that were of the same level of fame and magnitude?

For the major technology companies to reach their dominance in the technical world, they had to make several acquisitions that would blow up competitors from the market, and today we will talk about some of the most famous of those acquisitions arranged in descending order according to their value and how they shaped the technical history that we are contemporary with today.


Google’s acquisition of Fitbit

Because of Apple’s strength in the smartwatch industry, Google struggled to compete with it, which led it to acquire one of the most famous technology companies in the industry, Fitbit – founded in 2007 – for a sum of $2.1 billion.

We don’t know exactly what Google intends for the future of smartwatches, but it is taking deliberate steps in this matter, not to mention targeting its new audience who is accustomed to Fitbit smartwatches, and by the way, the number of this audience reaches about 29 million users.

The American software giant Google takes the field of smartwatches seriously and seeks with all its might to achieve success in it, and this did not appear in its acquisition of Fitbit, but also in its recent cooperation with Samsung, which resulted in the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, which led to The smartwatch market for Android systems has rebounded for the first time, reaching 17%, after it represented only 4% last year!


Oracle’s Acquisition of Sun Microsystems

In one of the largest acquisitions of its time, Oracle, famous for its cloud services, managed to acquire Sun Microsystems, and for those who do not know what that company is, let me tell you that Sun Microsystems is the developer of the famous programming language, “Java”.

It is worth noting that Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems from IBM after it outperformed it in an auction and acquired the company for $ 7.4 billion successful the deal in 2010, but we all saw what Google did to Oracle when it outperformed it and took the rights of the Java language in favor of the Android system to end Oracle’s legacy spans nearly a decade.

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Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub

Microsoft’s first entry to our extended list is sponsored by its acquisition of the largest open-source software company, GitHub, of course.

The acquisition occurred in 2018 when Microsoft spent about $7.5 billion to acquire GitHub and the loyalty of its 50 million users this number continues to rise and after the company joined the Microsoft banner, the number increased to about 60 million.


Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype

For the second time in a row, Microsoft entered the list, this time through the portal of the famous chatting application and one of the most famous communication platforms in the world, Skype. For those who do not know Skype; It is an app similar to Zoom today, but it is the oldest in this field.

When Microsoft completed the deal in 2011, the tech community was amazed at the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid; But considering Skype’s revenue at the time, that acquisition was logical, as the service was generating more than $ 800 million in revenue in a year, and indeed it was the dominant service in the field of video calls, but the Zoom application arrived during the Corona “flight” and got its share of the cake, which was kinda big!


Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp

The history of Meta (formerly Facebook) is full of huge acquisitions, as Mark Zuckerberg was working hard to make sure that there were no competitors in his field, and perhaps the most prominent of these acquisitions was when Facebook bought the Instagram platform for one billion dollars and the virtual reality company “Oculus” for 2 billion dollars. Despite the magnitude of the previous two acquisitions, it was not the highest that Meta paid to own another company, but Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp was the highest in the company’s history so far.

Where the acquisition of the green bubble, WhatsApp, cost $ 22 billion in 2014, and it was a deal that cannot be taken lightly on the technical level in general, and what is interesting in the matter is that the deal, in the beginning, was only about $ 19 billion, and it was still a huge number in that Time for a conversational app, but Mark was confident in the investment and didn’t hesitate to pay off that fortune, then boasted about it at a press conference where he said, “Nobody has done anything like this before!”


HP’s disastrous acquisition of Compaq

There are Many factors division of the giant HP into two separate companies in 2015, and for those who do not know, the company was a single entity until it split due to wrong decisions and administrative problems into two companies, HP Inc, and HP Enterprise.

But there is no doubt that HP’s disastrous attempt to include Compaq, which is famous for its computers in 2001, amounting to 25 billion dollars, is one of the most decisions that led to that separation, if not the first company’s catastrophe in the first place. Since the merger of the two companies, HP has suffered from many problems and initiatives. Failed, questionable takeovers, ineffective management, and two ethical scandals have led to the resignation of several CEOs.


For the third time, Microsoft appears on the list and acquires another company for another fantastic amount. That deal was the largest in the company’s history before we came to the deal that broke all previous acquisitions records.

By the time Microsoft was closing its biggest deal in 2016 at around $26.2 billion, the company was integrating its social networks with Office 365, and acquiring a company the size of LinkedIn would bring countless benefits to Microsoft that would use its IT staff to improve its business. user experience. Away from the details, we can note the success of the deal from the remarkable strength of LinkedIn and its clear impact in the current period.


IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat

After Microsoft completed its acquisition of GitHub, everyone expected that this deal would be the most expensive in the history of technology, especially when it comes to programming, but the giant computer company IBM came and surprised everyone with this acquisition.

IBM acquired the open-source Red Hat distribution system, which is one of the best distributions that exploited the capabilities of the Linux system in the best possible way, for about $ 34 billion in 2019 and now the distribution is under the control of IBM.

merger and acquisitions news | largest acquisition in history


Dell acquires EMC

On October 12, 2015, Dell announced its acquisition of the giant EMC for a whopping $67 billion as the most expensive technology acquisition in history at the time, and until recently.

In the past few years, we’ve found Dell doing a lot for its stock boom and it’s worth noting that it even tried to acquire the simulation giant VMware in 2018, but unfortunately couldn’t, you should also know that Dell has suffered through the vagaries of capitalism between privatization and global markets. “The company has gone through a lot,” that’s what we’re trying to say.


The largest acquisition in history !

Finally, we have reached our last stop, which is headed by Microsoft once again, and other than the company that honored our list as the most acquired companies can complete the biggest deal in history!

On January 18, 2022, we saw with our own eyes that Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion! For those who do not know, Activision is one of the most powerful companies in gaming history; The company has well-known titles such as Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, Candy Crush, and many more. All these games are under the throne of Microsoft and Phil Spencer (CEO of Xbox), and we are now waiting to see the fruits of this resounding deal.

In the end, it is worth noting that there are dozens of other and influential deals in technical history, but we wanted to address this article from the angle of the amounts of acquisitions, and we chose the most famous cases that attracted the attention of the whole world with their numbers and huge impact.

merger and acquisitions news | largest acquisition in history

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