Major Acquisitions in April 2021: A Roundup


Major Acquisitions in April 2021: A Roundup

The practice of acquisitions is to redirect and reshape corporate strategy has never been greater. Many managers esteem buying a company for access to markets, products, technology, resources, or management talent as a reduced amount of risk and faster than gaining the same objectives through internal efforts. Most of the analysts stress one of two ways to make acquisitions work. The coronavirus crisis is having and will continue to have a material global impact on acquisitions. On a massive scale and in a very short period of time, hundreds of thousands of businesses have shuttered or cut back their operations significantly. Let’s see some of the major acquisitions that took place in April 2021.

Hitachi acquisition of GlobalLogic a knock up for Indian E&RD segment

The $31 billion engineering, (E&RD) sector in India is in a delighted mood with Japan’s Hitachi declaring the procurement of US-based software development firm GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion.

The deal drives through are going to be the most important within the engineering services space, and can be the biggest by any Japanese firm.

Hitachi expects the accumulation of GlobalLogic's advanced digital engineering capabilities and its solid client base that include major technology companies,  to strengthen its digital portfolio. The acquisition will create collaborations across Hitachi's five sectors – IT, energy, industry, mobility and smart life – and automotive systems business (Hitachi Astemo) by accelerating the advanced digital transformation of social infrastructure like rail, energy, and healthcare at worldwide scale.

US-headquartered GlobalLogic has a momentous presence in India, Where half of its employees are based in Noida, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai. The company had been ramping up its presence in India since 2019.

Byju's to procure Aakash Educational Services in $700-million deal

India's major EdTech start-up Byju’s has acquired Blackstone Group-backed Aakash Educational Services Ltd. In an estimated $700-million cash-and-stock deal.

Post the transaction, Blackstone Group and Aakash Institute’s founders will hold a minority stake in Byju’s at a estimation of about $13 billion, founder Byju Raveendran stated. “We will integrate Aakash’s expertise in test preparation with our content and tech capabilities and will invest further capital into Aakash once the integration is done,” he added.

EY was the financial adviser for Byju's for the Aakash deal, while Phoenix Advisers was the exclusive adviser for Aakash Educational Services.

The Bengaluru-based company raised $460 million in a Series F funding round at a estimation of $13 billion. Raveendran said, “We will continue to expand the offline footprint and Aakash will be the front end of all our test preparation initiatives,” and A major portion of that capital will be used to finance the Aakash buyout.

In 2019, Blackstone picked up 37.5% stake in Aakash Educational Services, valuing it at around $500 million. The pandemic, however, hurt the company’s growth plans as revenue dropped from Rs 1,200 crore as on March 31, 2020, to Rs 1,000 crore in 2020-21.

Microsoft Corp acquires Nuance Communications for $19.7B

The partnership of Nuance and Microsoft offers a unique break to deliver meaningful value to shareholders who have supported the organization in this journey.

In this move it will double Microsoft's Total Addressable Market (TAM) as a healthcare provider to nearly $500 Billion, Microsoft will acquire Nuance for $56.00 per share, a transaction that is expected to close this calendar year. Mark Benjamin will continue as the CEO of Nuance, reporting to Scott Guthrie, who is the Executive Vice President of AI and Cloud at Microsoft.

Nuance delivers conversational AI and cloud-based medical and clinical intelligence for healthcare providers. Its solutions are  employed by 75% of radiologists within the US and in 77% of hospitals within the USA. Nuance's Healthcare Cloud revenue has also seen a 37% year-on-year growth. In India, Nuance has its branches in Pune and Bengaluru with 8,500 employees globally. 

Nuance also delivers customer engagement solutions, virtual assistants, biometric and digital solutions to companies around the world across all industries. This proficiency will come together with Microsoft's cloud, including Teams, Dynamics 365, and Azure, to develop effective customer engagement and security solutions.

Pine Labs acquired Southeast Asian fintech Fave in a $45-million deal

“The acquisition will support both companies to accelerate their growth in the Asia region and crack massive consumer opportunities across retail, F&B, fashion, and FMCG markets. Joining forces with Pine Labs will reinforce Fave’s market position in Southeast Asia”.

Fave’s founders will have their roles extended to lead the overall consumer platform for the group across Asia. Fave also will be hiring over many new employees in Southeast Asia and India to accelerate cashless payments and smart savings across the region. The firm claims to have allowed 6 million consumers in Southeast Asia to save $400 million across 40,000 retailers since 2016.

“Consumers have tremendous selections in their payment types. They want to be sure that they save on every transaction. Fave support consumers apply their best rewards, coupons, gift cards and cashback on all transactions in a seamless manner.”

Indian consumers are going to make use of the Fave app later this year to save over 500,000 merchant network points powered by Pine Labs across 3,700 cities within in the country. The app will be launched across all major Indian cities.

Pine Labs said, that the introduction of the Fave app within the country comes at a time when UPI has grown to 2.7 billion transactions. Pine Labs insist to have recorded a growth of 171% in UPI transactions over the last two quarters.

IBM acquires process mining provider myInvenio

IBM Corp. acquired Italian software maker myInvenio Srl, which delivers an analytics platform that assist enterprises determine how to apply best technologies such as robotic process automation in their operations.

Enterprises are applying RPA and other automation technologies will free up employees from repetitive business tasks such as copying transaction records between accounting applications. In a large Company, there could be many number of tasks that might be automated to at least some degree. Process mining products such as myInvenio’s platform support enterprises to categorize the workflows that they should automate first to attain the biggest return on their RPA and artificial intelligence investments.

The firm’s namesake platform converts usage data and collects from business applications into charts, analysts can check the most promising automation opportunities. The software can analyze how employees interact with a supplier management system to find which parts of ordering new merchandise take the most time. According to myInvenio, its algorithms shows the accurate cost of workflow bottlenecks to make evaluating the return from automation projects easier.

Tech Mahindra acquired hybrid cloud and DevOps services provider DigitalOnUs for $120 million

Tech Mahindra has attained 100% stake in the company to strengthen cloud-native development, hybrid cloud infrastructure and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) automation. Tech Mahindra told that the total reflection for the deal is "up to $120 million along with retention bonus and Earnout".

DigitalOnUs is headquartered in San Jose, the US, and it consists of more than 380 employees. For the financial year ending December 31, 2020, its revenue was $30.6 million.

"The acquisition of DigitalOnUs will change Tech Mahindra's capability in cloud native engineering, and position it to advance cutting-edge digital solutions for its clients.

“Scaling up shore distribution capability, within Mexico and Canada will be critical to perform digital transformation programs.

Lenskart acquires Delivery Start-up DailyJoy

Eye-wear brand Lenskart acquired essential delivery startup DailyJoy, the inaugural of a technology centre in Hyderabad which will offer employment to more than 100 people across engineering, product and design verticals within the next six months.

The Hyderabad tech-hub will provide employment in various teams across product, design and development, quality engineering, front end developers, java developers, android and IOS developers and data science engineers.

Their aim is to provide world-class solutions to Lenskart.