Who Buys Venture Backed Companies

Ernst and Young puts out a quarterly report on the VC industry.  It’s full of fantastic data (from their VentureOne group).  I just got my book today and am still sorting through it – I’ll put up a post soon with some of the take-aways.

Something that struck me right away was the list of the top acquirers of VC-backed companies.  They are :

IBM (5)
Cisco (5)
Tekelec (4)
C-COR (4)
Broadcom (4)
Thomson (3)
Motorola (3)
IAC (3)
Alcatel(3)

Not surprising to see IBM and Cisco on the list.  I was surprised not to see Microsoft,  Mercury (both of whom seem to be pretty active acquirers)  and a few other names on the list (didn’t Siebel acquire 3 or 4 companies last year?).  My  real surprise though was that this group of the 9 top acquirers of venture companies only accounted for only about 8% of all the venture backed m&a last year.  I thought there would have been more of a concentration of buyers, but apparently the majority of the list is made up of companies that bought only one venture backed company during the year.