Author
AVOLTA
Date
Mar. 07th, 2020
Since our last quarterly report (VC/M&A Tech Trends – France 2020 #1), the world has changed dramatically.
As of today, we’re still unsure about the impact of the crisis on the global economy. This unprecedented level of uncertainty is obviously going to have a huge impact on every type of Tech transactions (VC fundraising, LBO, M&A, IPO, etc.), both on the number of deals and on the valuations.
The blitzscaling motto, as Reid Hoffman defined it in his book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies as “the pursuit of rapid growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty”, which has been king in the last decade in the tech industry, will also be severely reconsidered as the very definition of uncertainty has been modified. One can forecast that the tradeoff between growth and profit in tech companies is going to swing for the first time in favor of the latter.
Considering this context, it seems all the more important to us to keep on tracking all transactions in Tech in Europe and informing you by publishing our reports.
One of the key takeaways of this new report (VC/M&A Tech Trends – France 2020 #2) is the relatively good performance of Q1-20 compared to last years: January and February offsetting March’s fall. But as lockdown has now been extended to May 11th in France, one can easily guess that Q2 is going to be one of the lowest quarters ever.
A question remains unclear for the moment: is the global economy – and thus VC/M&A Tech Trends – going to rebound stiffly like a “V curve”, or is the recovery going to last months, or even years?