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Facing unprecedented industry transformation and emerging competitive threats, many telecommunications companies are turning to mergers and acquisitions to add new capabilities and evolve their businesses for the next era. At the same time, in the biggest industry reset since deregulation, the integrated telco is giving way to more disaggregated, narrowly focused business models. We’re tracking telecom M&A activity around the world, and we’ll publish the latest developments in this dashboard each quarter.
Here are some of the key takeaways through the second quarter of 2024.
- Deal value up: Global telecom M&A continued its strong run. Deal value surged from about $16 billion in the first half of last year to $43 billion in the first half of 2024 (see Figure 1). Europe, the Middle East, and Africa accounted for more than 40% of the global total, as did the Americas.
- Trends to watch: Mobile and fixed network companies are pursuing scale deals to expand their networks (see T-Mobile’s UScellular and Lumos deals in the US). Meanwhile, financial investors are acquiring fixed assets, which suggests confidence in digital infrastructure’s business fundamentals despite recent headwinds.
- Biggest deal: So far, the year’s largest announced transaction was a fixed network deal: Fiber providers Uniti and Windstream agreed to a merger with an enterprise value of $13.4 billion.
- Scale deal momentum: Scale deals accounted for the largest share of global deal value in the first half of the year, a notable shift from the past two years (see Figure 2). Infrastructure divestments accounted for a large portion of telecom M&A activity from 2019 through 2022, but high interest rates and other macroeconomic challenges reversed that trend.
- Long-term view: Despite the recent decline, infrastructure divestments account for about 38% of all deal value over the past five years, the largest share among deal types (see Figure 3). Scale deals have the second-largest share at 31% during that period.
Bain’s Quarterly Global Telecom M&A Insights
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Telecommunications M&A
High inflation, regulatory uncertainty, and buyer-seller valuation gaps dampened telecom deals last year.