Broadcom paid about $69 billion for VMware and reached a 70% margin within a year. Its biggest customers renewed, and many are now shrinking their VMware use. A lesson in what speed costs.
Walgreens paid $5.2B for VillageMD control, backed an $8.9B physician roll-up, then wrote down $15.4B. What add-on acquirers should prove first.
Forward Air exceeded its cost-synergy target on the Omni Logistics deal and the equity still fell. What add-on acquirers should underwrite instead.
Apollo acquired Emerald and Questex simultaneously, then gave the CEO seat to the smaller company. What that choice reveals about selecting an operating model before Day 1.
Carrier paid €12 billion for Viessmann, then German heat pump demand halved. The promises that won the deal, from job guarantees to site commitments, shaped the integration that followed.
NVIDIA paid $7.13 billion for Mellanox before the AI boom. Networking became a $31 billion business, and the conditions China set to approve the deal are still in dispute.
Dream Finders agreed to pay $33.50 a share, about $2.2 billion, for Beazer Homes after six proposals in six months. The price is below book value, and the bigger prize may be the mortgages Beazer buyers already take out elsewhere.
Salesforce paid $27.7 billion for Slack at the height of the SaaS boom. Years later, AI is reshaping the strategic logic behind the acquisition.
Uber Freight paid about $2.25 billion for Transplace in 2021 to add enterprise shippers, TMS software and managed transportation. The deal more than doubled its revenue base and carried it through a freight recession, but margins have stayed near zero.
QXO paid about $17 billion for TopBuild, its third deal in 14 months. The bet rests on 22,000 job-site visits a day, and on changing the systems without disrupting the installers who make them.
