S4 remains the most active buyer in 2021 to date with seven deals as it continued its targeted M&A activity across digital content, media and data and also looked to acquire technology services capabilities.
Waterland Private Equity was the second most active party in the nine-month period with six transactions including their significant investment in Sideshow and four deals through their European digital group Intracto.
Blackstone and Accenture have shown good levels of ongoing activity in the space and we have also seen three deals from Publicis in the period.
We see no signs of a slowdown from private equity who represented six of the top 10 buyers in Q1-Q3 2021.