Valuation – Your Data Could Be Worth A Lot More Than You Think

Data that companies hold, whether on customers, website users, subscribers etc., is often worth much more than businesses realise. Various news articles have covered the increase in M&A activity driven by firms chasing data, not least Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp.

Recode today posts about the Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn being, essentially, a data grab (and makes a case for such data grabs to be subject to regulatory scrutiny).  While the FTC does not seem so keen on protecting consumer data, the EU certainly is.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says U.S. regulators didn’t pay proper attention to Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn, which he sees as a grab for data, not an acquisition of a social network.

Salesforce entered Microsoft’s territory when it acquired Quip, a word processing app, earlier this year. “Microsoft wants to maintain their monopoly, and doesn’t want innovation in that area,” said Benioff in an interview Monday with Recode’s Kara Swisher at Code Enterprise in San Francisco. “So they’re going to say, ‘Now we’re going to integrate all this LinkedIn stuff into Office, so why would you want Quip?’” Read the article here.