The Lina Khan Effect: Mega-Mergers "Plummeted in 2021"
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The Lina Khan Effect: Mega-Mergers "Plummeted in 2021"
Leadership does make a difference as Wall Street aims for lots of small transactions instead of a few mega-mergers.
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With Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division, dealmakers are taking note and the marketplace is changing. Here’s the FT:
Mega takeovers in the US — deals north of $25bn or $50bn — plummeted in 2021, according to data from Refinitiv, as companies particularly in pharma and tech have shied away from taking regulatory risks.
At the same time, smaller mergers are accelerating.
Dealmaking hit an all-time high in 2021, with more than $5tn worth of transactions generated predominantly by private equity firms, which tend to do smaller deals that avoid regulatory attention.
Private equity is really driven by Fed policy, and it can be trickier to stop those kinds of mergers with antitrust law. Khan has stated that private equity is a priority, but slowing that wave is probably impossible without changes to statute and/or monetary policy.
It’s not just the merger wave that is being reshaped by the new aggressive antitrust enforcement. News just broke that the FTC is now investigating Amazon’s cloud services arm, which is its most profitable division.
One issue the FTC could look at is whether Amazon has an incentive to discriminate against software companies that sell their products to clients of AWS, while at the same time competing with Amazon. The fear is that Amazon could punish the companies that work with other cloud providers and favor those that it works with exclusively.
I’m curious to see what the FTC comes up with on AWS. More than curious, actually. And I suspect that Khan’s aggressive posture will continue to reinforce the attitude of state enforcers like Karl Racine. Stay tuned…
The Lina Khan Effect: Mega-Mergers "Plummeted in 2021"
The smaller mergers can be worse than the big ones. Look at what PE has done to medical practices (NBC's Morgenson has a couple of recent very nice articles.) Fortunately, we're finally seeing physicians taking PE to court for practicing w/o licenses. I suspect PE rolls up lucrative specialties to form local monopolies with vertically-integrated supply chains when possible. They stay "under the radar" but the lawsuit is driving PE to heavily advertise "physician-owned." Perhaps the courts can drive PE out of medicine faster than anti-competitive regulation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/doctors-sue-envision-healthcare-say-private-equity-backed-firm-shouldn-rcna9276
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/get-money-dermatologist-says-patient-care-suffered-private-equity-back-rcna9152
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/12/california-suit-takes-aim-at-private-equity-engaging-in-illegal-practice-of-medicine-by-owning-outsourced-md-practices.html
AWS got a really good gig going. Once an organization does business with them, the procurement, of any "service" on AWS is a breeze. No new vendor to register, or contract with relines to negotiate, as is customary when purchasing software or services from a new vendor. Just go ahead and provision the on-demand service you want. AWS has a low friction mechanism for customers just like Amazon's one-click. And buy they will. Given the lack of sufficient tech talent in the market a lot of organization prefer cloud solutions (IaaS, Paas, and Saas).
While it is possible to manage the amount of services bought, it is not exactly easy on AWS. I have had many folks tell me they have so much running on AWS and they are not quite sure what runs on it, or if it is safe to shutdown. This is not AWS's fault, but they won't get in the way of customers not being well organized and frugal. You won't hear from AWS telling you that your provisioned services are barely being used, for example, and you should shut them down.
AWS does another neat trick, similar to the Amazon Basics. It goes like this: for any type of software it is well known that for 80% of the customers 20% of the functionality will suffice. AWS builds, or buys, that product with minimal investment and experiences high double digit growth. The product won't win any leadership positions with analysts, but it will sure capture a significant portion of the market, and at a healthy margin since the customers are not looking for the best; just good enough and scalable. AWS then 'partners' with the leading software vendors, letting them piggy back on their procurement already in place, and dealing with the more demanding customers when its own in-house product does not cut it. It helps that they are active and invest in the startup community.
Pure genius, and it works.
GCP has been desperately throwing "free" compute capacity in the market to win business, usually for the 1st year, knowing full well that no organization is fast enough to migrate their work that fast and take advantage of it. Even if they did, GCP has plenty of capacity sitting idle given how well AWS is doing.
Azure is arguably playing a similar game to AWS, with the Microsoft ecosystem working to its favor. It also takes advantage of a certain group to get a leg up on the competition.
https://www.brightworkresearch.com/how-indian-it-workers-discriminate-against-non-indian-workers/
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-bias-among-Indians-of-hiring-other-Indian-workers-in-the-IT-industry