@ CTIA: Throughts on Mobile Content M&A Market

I spent a lot of time speaking to people at the two mobile content conferences yesterday….and spent less time on the panels. I felt it was a better way to get the pulse, rather than the panels: how many times can you talk about full-song downloads, really?

Anyway, seems like the M&A activity in the mobile content market will be very selective in this cycle, from what I gather…the OpenWave-MusiWave deal is good indicator (OpenWave only paid about 2X revenues, which is pretty cheap). The valuations for other mobile content companies are pretty high and the mid to big mobile content players in a position to buy are looking for exits themselves, mainly through IPO. So you probably won’t see companies like Mforma making any acquisitions as they prepare for the IPO.

What will happen is you’ll see the first wave of acquisitions from big online players…my sense is that most of those players, like Yahoo and Google, will wait till second half of next year, when things are more settled down and the valuations are stable. They’ll make smaller acq-hire type of deal, to bring in engineering talent to build their own infrastructure.

Another big elephant in the room: Barry Diller’s IAC…it is on the prowl for acquisitions. It lost out on Airborne deal, and the IAC lady (whose name I don’t remember) was making the rounds of various companies exhibiting here at CTIA. Another possibility: You’ll see some of the players about to IPO be bought out, a la the IGN-News Corp deal…among the candidates there would be Mforma and others too.

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