Because M&A almost always requires a “forcing function” to finally get done.
Big Companies look to buy a number of companies, especially to fill key gaps (smaller deals) or to catch up where a market has changed and they are behind (bigger deals).
But all M&A almost always seems too expensive to most acquirers. Especially older acquirers like SAP are reluctant to pay a much higher multiple of revenue than they trade for. And the hotter and more successful the “target”, the more expensive it often can seem. And is. E.g., I am sure SAP would have been happy to pay 3x-4x revenues for Qualtrics. Almost 20x (what they paid in the end) is hard to justify … unless …
There is a Forcing Function. A forcing function inherently justifies a price, at least to your board of directors.
The best forcing functions are (x) another offer and/or (y) an IPO. Another offer puts a price on a deal. Google offered $6b for Github apparently, so Microsoft had to pay $7.5b to win the deal. Similarly, Qualtrics was literally about to IPO at $5b-$6b. So to “win” the deal vs. an IPO, SAP had to pay at least 25% more than the IPO price, probably more. $8b sounds about right.
SAP clearly wanted to buy Qualtrics for a long time, to try to help fix its huge gaps in Cloud. But it always probably seemed just a bit too expensive to justify.
Until there was a forcing function.
