It's monday and it's time to move on from the MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity. We did nine posts on employee equity and hopefully we moved the needle a bit on understanding that complicated topic.
I'd like to switch topics now and talk about acquisition finance. The other day Chris Dixon said this in a comment here at AVC:
the two biggest tech companies alone (apple and google) are approaching $100B in cash that they will likely use for acquisition to support their incredibly profitable businesses
The point Chris was making with that comment is there is a lot of buying power out there in the big tech companies that can be spent to buy tech startups. And he is right about that. Google has $34bn in cash. Apple has $50bn in cash and short term investments. Microsoft has $44bn in cash and short term investments. eBay and Amazon each have more than $5bn. The numbers add up to a lot of buying power out there.
But just because they have the cash doesn't mean they will use it. There are a number of factors that acquirers consider before pulling the trigger on an acquisition. They look at whether the acquisition will improve or hurt earnings going forward. They look at how they will have to book the acquisition on their balance sheet. They look at how dilutive the acquisition will be to shareholders (even if it is a cash acquisition, they may need to issue employee equity for retention). And most of all, they attempt to determine how the acquisition will be recieved by their shareholders and what impact it will have on their stock price.
I am calling this entire topic acquisition finance. I am not an expert on this topic but I've got a working knowledge of it and I am going to share that working knowledge with all of you over the coming weeks.
