20 Corporate Mega-Mergers of 2019

The merger of Newmont and Goldcorp created the world’s largest gold-mining company with expected annual production of between 6 million and 7 million ounces of gold for decades to come. Newmont was itself targeted earlier in the year by competitor Barrick Gold but was able to rebuff the $18 billion unsolicited bid. Barrick Gold and Newmont formed this past summer a joint venture in Nevada that is the world’s largest gold mining operation.

TV station owner Sinclair Broadcast bought several regional Fox sports networks as part of the Disney buyout of Twenty-First Century Fox. However, Disney had to divest these assets to avoid regulators considering a potential monopoly in the local sports market. Once the deal with Sinclair Broadcast was in place, Disney was able to clear Justice Department objections to the larger transaction.

Chipmaker Broadcom failed in 2018 to acquire competitor Qualcomm for a tidy $121 billion and then failed to acquire all of security systems provider Symantec. The all-cash acquisition of Symantec’s enterprise business is expected to pump up Broadcom’s top line but add little to the bottom line. The deal follows Broadcom’s 2017 acquisition of competitor Brocade for $5.5 billion in cash and the 2018 acquisition of CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash.

Each of the companies involved in this deal is controlled by billionaire Sumner Redstone, and his daughter Shari is a major presence on both boards. Redstone broke the companies apart in 2006 with CBS controlling the TV assets. The Redstones decided to put the companies back together again in the hope of more effectively competing with media giants like Disney and Warner.

Customer relationship management company Salesforce.com has been on a buying spree for the past couple of years, topped off in June by its $15.7 billion all-stock deal for Tableau Software, an analytics platform. The acquisition mode went into high gear in March 2018 with a $6.5 billion in cash and stock deal for Mulesoft and continued with a $1.35 billion cash and stock August acquisition of ClickSoftware Technologies. The company is seeking to boost revenue, but the costs of all these acquisitions have been weighing on profits.