According to a report on January 4, the number of mergers and acquisitions related to Japanese enterprises (M&A) in 2020 decreased for the first time in nine years. According to RECOF (Tokyo), a merger and acquisition consulting firm, it is 8.8% lower than in 2019, to 3,730 cases.
This is due to the temporary stagnation of negotiations due to the COVID-19 epidemic. However, there are more reorganization cases in the field of IT, aiming to cope with the rapid changes in the social situation such as digital acceleration.
In the first half of 2020, due to the rapid deterioration of the economic situation, the enterprises that turned to defense gave priority to ensuring the funds at hand, and the merger and acquisition market narrowed.
Difficulty to go abroad has led to a downturn in overseas mergers and acquisitions. In the second half of the year, the economic recovery is expected to be warmer, especially the mergers and acquisitions between domestic enterprises, and other trends will become active again.
This statistic is based on the content of the enterprise when it is published. Total mergers and acquisitions decreased by 17.2% to 14.7741 trillion yen in 2020.
In terms of single mergers and acquisitions, the first acquisition of ARM, a British semiconductor development giant owned by Softbank Group (SBG), is the acquisition of 4.2 trillion yen by American semiconductor giant NVIDIA.
Among domestic companies in Japan, the merger of Mitsubishi Japan Union Leasing and Hitachi Capital ranked fourth.
Under the COVID-19 epidemic, the popularization of telecommuting and other digitalization have become a key topic in enterprise activities.
According to RECOF analysis, there are more business companies that absorb IT innovative enterprises and promote change.
