October Tech M&A Webinar: Quarterly Report
Bruce Milne
Welcome to our global tech M&A monthly report. This month we’re featuring our Q3 quarterly report with all 23 market segments. Thank you for joining us, I’m your moderator, Bruce Milne.
As to our agenda today, I’ll be talking about unusual buyers. The world of buyers is expanding and it seems like everyone is buying these days, as you’ll soon see. Then we’ll have a special report on the JOBS Act. That will be followed by our Q3 report on tech M&A. We’re also adding a special section to this quarterly report, a closing perspective; what do we make of all this? That will be followed by a Q&A.
Unusual Buyers
Every month we run into some situation that has us scratching our head. We try to share some of those with you, those from the B-list of buyers, but it is getting broader and broader. It simply indicates that you have to do a global search and you have to leave no stone unturned.
Recently, there were some unusual transactions that underscored this. The Climate Corporation. Wow. Almost $1B spent by Monsanto. Monsanto is the 800 pound gorilla in the agriculture industry, and they want to be able to do customized weather mapping and make customized feeds for each market. Big ideas.
Fairfax Corporation going after Blackberry. Why in the world would they do that? Ostensibly they said they’d like to keep the company and the jobs in Toronto. If you tuned in June 24th, 2011 to CNBC, our own Nat Burgess was on there with a panel, talking about the value of Blackberry’s patents. They’re worth a fortune.
Tesco buying a music streaming company. The only comment I have on this is that Tesco is also the company that just a few years ago was going to come in and teach the grocery companies here how to do their jobs and how to compete. They kind of left with their tail between their legs, so I’m not sure I understand this acquisition at all.
The next one is interesting, the German Post Office, Deustche Post, buying IntelliAd. Maybe our own post office should rethink their strategy.
Here’s another interesting one, Brother, they make more than sewing machines, printers, lots of things. But how in the world would they outbid the entire world for a company like Nefsis? They provide web-based collaboration and conference software. Well, they’re basically trying to reinvent themselves, and we’re seeing more and more buyers like that.
Speaking of reinventing yourself, how about Best Buy? I know some of you have owned that stock and it’s had some travels. They’re under the gun. They bought MindShift. Again, changing the game, they’re trying to reinvent themselves.
Look at some of our own transactions, Bosch recently bought Inubit. That’s interesting because Bosch is a company of 300,000 employees, privately held, $50B. You think about what Bosch does, they make things for cars, I think I have one of their washing machines, but they tend to be top of the line products. They want to add intelligence. They’re going to add more intelligence to all the items they manufacture. That was a smart acquisition, but nobody would have thought of Bosch when we first started this process. They outbid everyone.
Here’s another, Warm Spring Ventures. We sold Cort Directions, a small Oregon software company, and when they wanted to sell again, the buyer said they’d sell again. We sold it again, and this time it was Warm Springs, the Indian Nation, Native Americans who ran casinos in Central Oregon. They loved the fact that Cort had been a training ground for some of their up and coming tech leaders.
Lastly, I went back to the archives. Idexx Laboratories has made chemicals, feeds, things like that. They bought Advanced Veterinary Systems. They were part of the food chain for AVS, but the real story here was that this company was a whole new paradigm in how to deliver online services to the veterinary market, which was also a precursor to online services, such as bringing in the world’s best medical expert to help you do online surgery for animals later, and maybe to humans. This has turned into a great acquisitions, but at the time we wouldn’t have thought about Idexx Labs.
So there we have it for unusual buyers. Food for thought.
Now let’s turn to a special report on the JOBS Act. We’re just starting to get that implemented. Let’s heard from Elon Gasper and Alina Soltys. What do we have?
JOBS ACT UPDATE
Elon Gasper
Bruce, a year and half ago, the JOBS Act became the biggest change in US Securities law in 80 years, with bipartisan support for improving the ability of smaller businesses to raise money and grow and hire. 18 months ago we reported in on the potential of its three main parts, or Titles, for enhancing valuations by increasing M&A demand. Let’s see how they worked out.
Alina Soltys
Title I went into effect immediately, creating an IPO on-ramp which well over a hundred companies have used to go public. Technology companies have seen the largest impact, with Twitter and ZuLily attracting particular attention this month. 90% of smaller IPOs—under $1B—have used the Title I on-ramp since it opened. With 85% of those under a quarter-billion, it’s a good bet most of these companies wouldn’t have gone public otherwise.
Elon Gasper
And our predictions that Title I tech capital would power M&A for growth are being born out, with fast young public companies able to gallop ahead by consolidation thanks to the JOBS Act. Just look at the first couple tech Title I events: Splunk showed this by buying Bugsense last month, and ProofPoint proves the point with four acquisitions since its Title 1 debut, the latest just last week. Plus another Title, V, enables many companies to raise more money but stay private with up to 2000 investors - that’s another capital path and acquisition driver. Taking many sellers off the market faster creates further scarcity, driving higher valuations and liquidity for those remaining. We stand by our predictions and note that this momentum is just beginning to build. Buyers will need to raise their game to keep up with this hot capital from Title I and V.
Alina Soltys
That’s good news for small companies, and so is Title II. It was delayed but finally went into effect a few weeks ago. It modernizes the frustrating old rules against advertising.
Elon Gasper
I’ll always remember my first start-up, and the would-be investors our lawyers told us we must turn away.
Alina Soltys
Well, now it’s easier to use public notice to connect with investors, though the requirement for companies to verify accreditations may reduce the overall impact. Still, we think in practice it’ll prove usable, so we stand by our analysis of Title II’s positive impact on M&A, as well.
Elon Gasper
The SEC is still working on the Title II rules required by the Jobs Act, including a proposal to allow companies to raise as much as $1 million through crowdfunding by non-accredited investors—the regular folks who now swarm KickStarter and IndieGoGo raising millions of dollars for software like games, despite being prohibited from receiving any equity benefits or other upside participation.
Alina Soltys
Nonetheless, this has driven the creation of at least 500 active crowdfunding platforms—some offering equity based holdings—though for accredited investors only until Title III comes into effect.
Along with activity abroad, this is creating a crowdfunding niche in the financial services sector;
Elon Gasper
Witness overseas deals like the Q3 purchase of Italy’s Kapipal by international crowdfunding network GrowVC, based in Asia. Plus, Google’s lent further credibility to the crowdfunding concept with its investment in LendingClub in Q2. The development of these new forms of financial services companies represent early steps to a global platform funneling funds to tech from unacredited investors.
Alina Soltys
The public’s diverse tastes will certainly broaden the range of Buyers and Sellers. As crowdfunding lowers barriers to entry, enabling threats to emerge sooner in newly proven markets, it will drive M&A consolidation among these overlapping ideas and business models, and there are also those quick pick-ups of brilliant technology.
Elon Gasper
In conclusion, even half-implemented the JOBS Act is already a success in bringing capital and creating tech jobs, and accelerating tech M&A; all signs indicate there’s more to come. Back to you, Bruce.
Bruce Milne
Wow. Extraordinary stuff. I was just at a conference earlier this week, and my friends in the legal community issued a caution there, what happens when you have potentially hundreds of unqualified investors, and then you go to sell? They haven’t really tested that one yet. Stay tuned.
Now, Elon, let’s return to your group and bring in Amber Stoner and Jason Steblay, for your quarterly research report on all 23 sectors.
Q3 Corum Research Report
Elon Gasper
Thanks, Bruce. We begin with the Public Markets, where the 3rd Quarter held up its share of the Tech M&A banner year flagstaff, with further records being set as an active M&A market progressed into the final turn of the calendar. And even in Q4 this month the US—and other—governments’ political problems have barely cooled the tech markets, as this blazing hot social-mobile-cloud cycle, record corporate cash coffers, cheap money, international buyers, and new factors like the JOBS Act, all stoke the furnace and keep the hot sectors at a rolling boil. Alina, what’d the Corum Index cook up in Q3?
Alina Soltys
We track a number of key stats over time in the Corum Index. The headlining number for this 3rd Quarter 2013 year-over-year comparison is the level of Megadeals. With 15 recorded, we blew past the level of any quarter since the credit crisis. Although not the largest deal of the year, Microsoft finally pulled the trigger with the acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, paying $5 billion. Behind the sheer number of Megadeals are strong valuations. Information security provider Trusteer hit the jackpot with valuation of 26x revenue, after IBM picked them up in August. Meanwhile, in July Cisco paid 10.7x sales for another security leader: Sourcefire.
Overall deal activity has been slower this quarter, and in fact for the year, but this healthy dose of Megadeals and hyper valuations is an indicator that there is strong demand for strategic transactions that add value in dramatic ways. The Corum Index also reports a steady increase in PE-backed deals. In the 3rd quarter, there were more than 50 deals lead by private equity.
Contrarily, the economic recession strengthened the cash position of most the strategic and financial buyers. We can’t say it too often: there are record cash hordes. Apple held 10% of the total $1.48 trillion held by non-financial firms and overall, technology companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google made up over a THIRD of the total. Pfizer was the only non-tech company in the top 5 holdings.
In the face of strong demand from the buyer community, we believe this has set up a supply shortage in many sectors of the market for mid-level, mature companies in need of the financial and operational boost provided by buyers. Companies that may have been reluctant, but nonetheless have been willing to test the waters this year, have been richly rewarded.
Elon Gasper
Those deals have been worldwide, centered as usual this quarter on North America and Europe.
In the former they picked up the pace set in the first half of the year a bit with 531 sellers during Q3, buyers again outnumbering sellers with 592 completing acquisitions. So it’s not surprising to see American companies reaching abroad for transactions to fuel growth, such as United Internet’s acquisition of Spanish hosting provider Arsys for $186 M or 3.6x sales.
Europe continued to see more sellers than buyers during 3rd quarter, but a notable intra-regional deal was French company Schneider Electric’s buyout of its British rival Invensys for about $5B at 1.7x sales in one of this month’s Megadeals.
Moving outh, continued interest in Latin American targets from other continents resulted in the region being home to 4 times as many sellers as buyers, reinforcing again the importance of a global search for sellers of tech companies there.
Asia achieved a perfect balance between buyers and sellers in Q3, though cross-border transactions still featured prominently in the region’s deal flow as North American Cloud Solution provider Endurance International took out Indian hosting and managed services provider Directi Web for $105 Million.
Finally, Africa/Mideast targets were also sought more by foreign acquirers than by regional ones. A key deal in the region was Seattle-based F5 Networks $100 Million acquisition of Israeli infosec-provider Versafe.
Alina Soltys
Moving into the six technology sectors that Corum tracks; here is a view of them in aggregate over the last 5 quarters with revenue and EBITDA multiples hitting the highest points since Q2 2011. Revenue on average has crossed over the 2x multiple mark, and EBITDA now stands at a strong 11.65x. As we’ve been reporting upticks in the individual segments, it’s no surprise that the strong public market performance prior to the government stalemate has in fact driven these values higher.
For this quarterly review, let’s move into the sector reports with further detailed callouts from the subsectors, starting with Horizontal. Amber?
Amber Stoner
The Horizontal sector remains the definitive valuations leader among our six main sectors reaching 12 month highs for both sales and earnings multiples in September. All eight subsectors experienced increases in sales and earnings multiples, with some of the biggest gains in the Business Intelligence, Human Resources, and SCM subsectors.
One of the biggest players in the ERP space, SAP, is on pace to do as many deals in 2013, with six deals done so far this year, as they did in 2011 and 2012 combined. They have a habit over that time span of doing at least one Megadeal per year, SuccessFactors in 2011 and Ariba in 2012 and 2013 is no different with the roughly $1B Hybris deal back in June.
In addition to the Hybris deal, this year they’ve also made acquisitions in a number of subsectors including SCM with the acquisition of SmartOps in February, HR with the acquisition of KMS Software in May, and most recently BI with last month’s acquisition of KXEN. The KXEN acquisition is especially interesting as it deals with predictive analytics which we’ve been seeing a lot more of recently with the increasing interest in Big Data. KXEN fills a hole in SAP’s existing predictive analytics portfolio allowing it to better compete with the likes of SAS Institute, IBM and Oracle going forward.
Elon Gasper
Buyers worldwide are also going forward on the hunt for mobile advertising SaaS to capture a new generation of customers and seize on the success of Facebook and other networks’ recent breakthroughs in traffic monetization. For example, Chicago mobile marketing tech leader Vibes bagged the US assets of its London competitor Lumata; and [x+1] purchased WirelessDeveloper to expand its mobile marketing reach. WDA's technology has become a central element of the [x+1] programmatic ecosystem to meet the full range of customers’ needs. In another case, French advertising giant Criteo made a more than $7M step forward in mobile advertising field with its British acquisition of AD-X Tracking technology.
On to the next of our six markets. Jason?
Jason Steblay
That would be the Internet sector, which recorded some interesting deals during the third quarter too, especially as the EBITDA multiple reached 12 month highs and the sales multiple bounced back to its highest level since January. Not surprisingly, both the internet sub sectors, pure play and infrastructure, are up since the mid-year.
A distinct trend over the quarter in the Internet space has been the consolidation among online gambling and betting companies, starting with Sportech, which acquired Data Tote, a UK betting operator for $5M.
Meanwhile, Ladbrokes, the UK sports betting giant acquired Australia’s rapidly growing online betting business Gaming Investments for $20M, reinforcing Ladbrokes’ strategy to extend its geographic reach in regulated markets.
Another trend in the internet sector has been the use of M&A by online offer and ecommerce providers such as Livingsocial to grow and expand their product lines. Ebay, fresh off its $800M acquisition of online payment provider BrainTree, purchased daily deal aggregator Bureau of trade signaling that it is likely considering providing the legions of merchants that use its platform online offer opportunities.
Groupon, one of the original online offer innovators, has continuously expanded the breadth of the products and services it offers to consumers through its website, many times through acquisition, as it did in September with the purchase of local activities marketplace provider sideTour.
Finally, Discount Coupon Corp acquired another Florida based online offer website, Cloops, in connection with its plan to become a major player in the industry by consolidating rapidly growing providers.
Elon Gasper
Rapidly growing describes Vertical valuations, too, as that applications market climbed to a multi-year high in both Sales and EBITDA ratios. Healthcare multiples lead the way as usual, but stretching their lead as the changes in the US market force multiple waves of consolidation; that’s detailed in our special World Financial Symposiums report last month at wfs.com.
A/E/C and energy sectors are the other leaders; the only up-trend exception is financial services, which remained steady over Q3, though it had a higher earnings multiple due to the wave of SaaS-involved transactions.
Reviewing a few of those, we see Michigan-based Portfolio Director bringing New Jersey’s Scivantage a product suite for financial advisers and investors seeking Web-based service solutions. Similar are both the strategic buyout of alternative investment management solutions provider Data Agent by industry leader Confluence, and British PE HgCapital’s investment in IntelliFlo, one of the leading SaaS providers for Financial Advisors and Brokers providers.
Natural language/speech processing is hitting the radar this month with purchases by high-profile buyers Facebook, Google and Intel that include a broad range of tech tailored to fit vertical needs, from search engine speech and web update algorithms, to contact center interaction, translators, lecture subtitlers, device controllers... As a former speech and language processing inventor myself, it’s fascinating to see the value realized from such diverse instantiation being stood up vertically, instead of arising as core tech broadly enabling consumer applications. Speaking of which, how’s that sector doing, Alina?
Alina Soltys
The Consumer market has remained on a steady curve with a small decline in the digital content Subsector, but made up by video games.
Within the deal section a common thread emerges: improving sharing capabilities. Google, a constant player on the M&A scene, completed its acquisition of California-based Bump Technologies that provides a file sharing application for Android and iPhone users enabling the immediate sharing of files, videos and photos through physically tapping or "bumping" devices together. This improves Android, creating richer alternatives to near-field communication and becoming more competitive in sharing. Of Course Apple has not fallen behind, addressing sharing through its new updates in iOS7.
Vizibility allows you to create mobile business cards for individuals and companies that can be shared online via email, through QR Codes on physical cards or by smartphone—they have become part of All-State International—the legal services provider. The integration plan will fit Vizibility into All-State’s online print portal, eliminating duplication efforts and delivering a lower cost of ownership.
Finally, Samsung announced acquisition of Boxee, a New York based startup firm, whose set top box can record TV broadcasts and stream online videos, photos, and music, irrespective of the source from local network files or the internet. Boxee shores up the talent at Samsung for their Smart TV initiative. After LG failed to gain traction with their Smart TV upgrader set top box , Samsung wants to come to market with a strong team and product that has numerous happy users, including me, with only good things to say about Boxee.
Amber Stoner
And we have good things to say about the Infrastructure sector as well, as it remained strong over the course of Q3, with increases among almost all of the subsectors; the exception being systems management which did experience a minor drop in valuations from Q2. But that didn’t stop a couple of our systems management companies, IBM and BMC, from making acquisitions in the last three months.
In fact, IBM did three deals in Q3, among them the acquisition of Daeja Image Systems, a provider of multi-format document viewing software, in a move to provide organizations with the tools to manage and work with their data, thereby increasing IBM’s already existing big data capabilities.
In the midst of going private, BMC Software took the time to make two acquisitions this quarter, both in the month of August. BMC bought Bangalore-based team collaboration SaaS provider KineticGlue Online Communities and quickly followed that up with the acquisition of Vancouver-based Partnerpedia, a provider of enterprise application store and marketplace solutions. The acquisition of Partnerpedia enables BMC to distribute apps for desktop, cloud, Web and mobile and furthers BMC’s ability to capitalize on the consumerization of enterprise IT.
Meanwhile, Citrix Systems has acquired UK-based office productivity suite specialist Byte Squared to expand the functionality it can offer in its own enterprise cloud platform. Citrix will integrate the Byte Squared suite into its ShareFile enterprise cloud file-syncing and sharing platform, which it acquired back in 2011.
Finally, we continue to keep an eye on Cisco, who did two deals in Q3 for a total of 8 so far in 2013. We talked about the $2.7B Sourcefire deal when it happened back in July and Cisco followed that up by spending $415M to get all-flash array storage startup Whiptail Technologies last month.
Jason, can you close us out with IT Services?
Jason Steblay
Sure, it’s continuing to have a strong year. During the quarter the sales multiple reached 12 month highs. Meanwhile, the sales multiples in the Asian IT service market reached at least 6 month highs in September as well.
One of the largest deals of the 3rd quarter in the IT services sector was Synnex corporation’s $500M acquisition of IBM’s CRM BPO business. Although the business generated $1.3B in revenue last year, it was little more than 1 percent of IBM’s total revenue.
Elsewhere Brazilian IT solutions provider Stefanini made its tenth acquisition in four years and third in the US, by picking up New Jersey-based RCG Global Services to strengthen its presence in North America. Stefanini isn’t the only services firm finding that Latin America is an effective operating base from which to deliver services to North America. Globant, an Argentine IT services provider, recently filed papers to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, in the process revealing that 82% of its revenue is generated in North America.
During the third quarter we also saw IT distributors turn to M&A. The emergence of cloud computing has really caused Distributors to rethink their strategies. Many have decided that managed services will be strong source of channel profit in the future. Reflecting that thinking, Ingram Micro, one of the global giants, acquired SoftCom, a Canadian provider of cloud infrastructure services and web hosting solutions, in September.
Distributors also use M&A to drive international scale. Arrow electronics, the American IT distributor, signed a definitive agreement in September to buy Germany’s Computerlinks AG, a value-added reseller of business management, security and consumer software for almost $310M, completing its fifth international acquisition in 18 months.
Elon Gasper
What a quarter! Back to you, Bruce.
Bruce Milne
That’s amazing. Was it double the Megadeals and Megadeals lead the way. $1.5T in cash, high multiples, and did I read that right, I was counting, were there only three market sectors of the 26 that were down?
Elon Gasper
That’s right, Bruce.
Bruce Milne
Wow. Closing commentary. Nat, what do you make of all this?
Closing Perspective
Nat Burgess
Well, Bruce, if you’ve been following the monthlies, as we who participate in them have, you’ll notice a few exciting things in this month’s report. First of all: Deals in all sectors. Lots of deals, lots of activity. Second, words like demand and scarcity that indicate perhaps a shift in the dynamic toward sellers.
What I’m thinking now, after listening to all the commentary today is, has it become a seller’s market? Do seller’s currently have more power than they have in the last few years? Let’s look at a few points that relate to that.
I sat down last week with the CEO of an LA-based company that have been growing at a 60% compound average growth rate for the last three years, over $20M in revenue, and we showed him a screen of potential buyers, 25 multi-billion US software companies. What was interesting was that none of them were growing faster than 10%. They’re stuck. They need to figure out how to grow. Some of them, one of them in particular, Autodesk, has even announced that they’re not going to grow. The CEO came out last December and said they want Wall Street to measure them on profits, not revenue growth. Interesting. They need growth, they all need growth, so I guess the first point here on scarcity here and demand and the seller’s market, is that buyers aren’t growing organically. They need inorganic growth, and they’re going to get it through M&A.
Now let’s look at some of the earlier stage companies. Bruce and I were at a startup conference in Seattle yesterday. We actually keynoted the event. We had 50 companies in the room, a lot of them were very early, like a Powerpoint and a few screens built, and about a quarter of them had been approached, so what does that tell us?
Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, these guys are all going after startups. The job market is so tight, so competitive, especially down in the Valley, they just can’t hire people in high demand areas like mobile developers and the skilled teams there are starting their own businesses. So, in many cases, the only way the big guys can hire is through acquisitions, so there’s more demand, more scarcity.
Third, and this one we’ve been scratching our heads on for a couple of years: for as long as I’ve been following the M&A markets, which is over 25 years now, M&A volumes and valuations have moved in lockstep with the public markets. That’s been true through boom and bust, it was true in the dot-com era and in 2007-2008. For the last two years, it hasn’t been true, in fact, public markets have been recovering, and M&A has been relatively slow through 2012, and certainly slower than the analysts expected through the first half of this year. But, there are clear indications that the M&A market is now catching up. We see that just in the number of deals that the team is reporting on here this month, we see that in the inbound calls from the buyers and the PE firms looking for deals, and frankly we see it in our own deals, we have six scheduled to close before the end of the year. Definitely the deal flow here is weighted toward the end of the year. High demand, high activity, look for lots of deals in Q4.
Point number four, companies buy other companies when they have no other choice. M&A is risky, it’s expensive. Buyers will pay a premium only when they have to, when they’re worried about losing deals. They can lose deals to other buyers, they could be in a competitive scenario, they could be in a process, and they could lose the deal to another buyer. They can also lose deals to IPOs. In the old days, you’d see a company file for an IPO and immediately the buyers would descend, because they didn’t want them to go public and get more expensive and more complicated and have more funding. That stopped in the last few years. We saw LinkedIn and Facebook get out, that was about it. But that’s changed as well. We sold a company to Textura last year, they subsequently went public, they’re trading at 30x revenue, and our client’s deal is worth at least triple what we negotiated for them. They’re well-funded for acquisitions. So point four, the resurgent IPO market is forcing buyers to buy and it is creating capital for buyers to make acquisitions.
Finally, crowdfunding, this was a hot topic on this month’s report with the JOBS Act. The fact is, companies can now access capital more cheaply, they have fewer regulatory restrictions on how many investors they can have in the firm, they can sometimes do it without dilution, ala Kickstarter, so we’re certainly seeing surge in crowdfunding and organized angel activity.
A good friend of Corum, Dan Shapiro, we’ve helped him out along the way with a couple of deals, including selling Sparkbuy to Google, he launched a Kickstarter in September, he wanted to raise $25,000 to create a board game to help kids learn the basics of programming. In the month of September he didn’t raise $25,000, he raised $630,000! Here’s a guy who figured out a product, his audience, and he used crowdfunding to just blow the doors off. That’s the trend, that’s the wave of the future. That’s a big threat to the big incumbents. It’s putting their business at risk, and a result of that, in our view, of cheaper more available funding through crowdfunding, means the big guys are going to see competitive threats forming faster, they’re going to have to act fast, and they’re going to have to buy the little guys earlier for higher prices.
Back to you, Bruce.
Bruce Milne
Thanks, Nat. We’re running just a few minutes over, as we always do with these quarterly reports, so we don’t have much time for questions. There was one that came in regarding timing, “How long will this trend continue, should this wait until next year?”
Nat, that sounds like you could cover this one.
Nat Burgess
It’s always fun to look in the crystal ball. If you’ve been to our events, our merge briefings, you see that we’re actually pretty confident in some of the underlying trends that are driving disruption and the continued power of the little guy to innovate and to build value and get acquired. We’re certainly seeing that demand spiking right now.
Would I wait until next year? No, frankly, I wouldn’t. I would think very carefully about a scenario, and this happened in 2000, and it happened in 2007, where you could have waited and doubled your revenue and your business would be worth half as much. So, there’s momentum, confidence, an appetite out there, so if you have something of value, and especially if you’re competitive and getting approached and there’s activity in your sector... get in traffic and see what’s going to happen. We don’t know how long it’s going to last, but we know, like all markets, this one will drop at some point.
Bruce Milne
Yup, we’ve done over 300 transactions and I can tell you that waiting too late is a disaster. Getting out there too early, you learn a lot, get out of the market, grow a bit, go back, they know you, they’ll buy you. That’s why we have this hiatus process.
There was one other question that came in about China and Latin America. We just did a conference on each, I’d encourage you to tune into those. I’m going to a meeting after this: the Chinese are going to aggressively buying Western companies.
The more educated you are, the better your chances for success. I hope to see some of you at our upcoming conference events around the world. Please visit our website, register, and get educated. Thank you for joining us for the quarterly report, we look forward to seeing you again next month.