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The Biggest Recent Retail Takeovers and Mergers — worth reading first
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It's been a really intense couple of years for retail. With e-commerce businesses like Amazon continuously encroaching on retail space and big-name businesses like Walmart snapping up small start-ups, it seems like the retail community is shrinking into a smaller world. We've created this retail mergers and acquisitions businesses list so that consumers can keep better track of the money changing hands. Who owns who? Who bought a bunch of smaller businesses recently? What are the largest mergers and acquisitions in retail in the past few years?
The recent mergers 2017 brought us include many eyebrow-raising orders, like Disney's plan to buy of 21st Century Fox and Apple's purchase of Shazam, but a retail acquisition really caught plenty of headlines: Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods. This has the potential to change the whole landscape of how we purchase food. Now that Amazon has the data for a new area of consumer behavior (specifically grocery shopping), many retail experts and grocery chain managers are quaking in their boots. We don't have many clues as to what they plan to do with their new, shiny purchase, but this is one of Amazon's biggest or most successful business mergers. 2017 also involved the purchase of numerous small tech businesses like Body Labs and Graphiq along with English-Arabic Souq.com. Meanwhile, past years have involved Amazon buying Zappos and Audible, both of which ended up being very smart orders!
But the business that seemed to snap up the most competitors in 2017 was Walmart. Acquisitions and mergers are the Walton family's expertise, in any case, and this year involved them buying Web-based powerhouses: Bonobos, ModCloth.com, Moosejaw, Shoebuy.com, Hayneedle.com, and Parcel (which is a delivery business). That's a lot for one year! This shopping spree for the shopping gurus follows the Walmart/Jet.com acquisition of 2016. So, while Amazon might be getting more headlines, the biggest e-commerce acquisitions have been Walmart's, by far.
Besides that of those two huge businesses, the biggest mergers and acquisitions in retail in the past few years is Petsmart, who bought Chewy.com, Michael Kors, who bought Jimmy Choo, AC Moore, who bought the online craft supply store Blitsy, CVS, who bought a host of strange businesses including the health insurer Aetna Inc., and QVC, which merged with HSN. We'll likely continue to see the top retail businesses merge repeatedly until we wind up with conglomerates that can compete with Amazon and Walmart. Who knows what the next major retail mergers will be?
