Of the four M&A deals announced worldwide in September with transaction values of more than $10 billion, three were in the technology, media and telecommunications sector.

September's four $10 billion-plus transactions marked a revival after a relatively slow July and August for large-scale M&A.

In the largest of the month's announced deals, with a $19.91 billion transaction value, Verizon Communications Inc. plans to acquire Frontier Communications Parent Inc. The second-largest is a $16.13 billion transaction under which an investor group led and managed by Blackstone Inc. intends to acquire datacenter platform AirTrunk Operating Pty Ltd. The fourth of the $10 billion-plus deals and also under the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sector is an $11.59 billion transaction under which DIRECTV Entertainment Holdings LLC plans to acquire DISH Network Corp.

A wave of TMT consolidation is being driven by legacy media companies working to keep up with a changing market, including the rise of streaming services and fiber-optic broadband, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett said in an interview.

"Those guys with only pay TV are feeling stress, and the urge to merge is an urge to survive," Crockett said.

The only non-TMT deal with a transaction value over $10 billion is the proposed $15.82 billion acquisition of Schenker AG by Denmark-based freight and logistics company DSV A/S.

Consolidation

The DIRECTV-DISH transaction comes 22 years after the two companies last tried to combine. In 2002, the US Justice Department blocked a DIRECTV-DISH deal due to anticompetitive concerns. The combination would have created the second-most subscribed-to company on the market at the time, with 20 million subscribers.

In 2024, the combined company would have 18 million subscribers but would be only the ninth-most subscribed-to service, dwarfed by the 115 million subscribers of Amazon.com Inc.'s Prime Video.

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The emergence of fiber-optic broadband as the future of high-speed internet sparked Verizon's Frontier Communications acquisition, Argus Research analyst Joe Bonner said in an interview.

The transaction is actually the repurchase of assets that Verizon sold to Frontier Communications roughly a decade ago when the telecom industry widely adopted wireless technology over landline telephones, Bonner said. In the time since, wireless competition has increased and Verizon has been losing its technology lead on its competitors — a trend that the company is trying to reverse with the purchase of Frontier Communications fiber-optic broadband resources, Bonner said.

The industry has shifted toward combining wireless offerings, concentrated in major cities, with broadband services in rural and suburban areas, Bonner said. Acquiring a fiber-optic network enables the company to marry wireless and broadband without the yearslong process of building out a fiber-optic cable network, he added.