More importantly, Indian IT companies, as well those in other industries, are stepping up acquisitions.
Publicis and a rival French agency company, Havas Advertising, which last month acquired Snyder Communications in Bethesda, Md., are aggressively stepping up acquisitions.
Cash-rich companies aggressively bought their own shares, and they also stepped up acquisitions, pushing merger activity to the highest level since 2007.
Bush administration officials have said they would like Fannie and Freddie to step up their acquisitions of home loans to support the real estate market.
With stability creeping back into the economy, the burning question is just how much the big IT vendors will step up their acquisitions and where the new battle lines will be drawn.
Secondly, large consumer companies will step up their acquisition activity.
Following executive-pay curbs announced on February 4th, the new plan restricts dividends to a penny, forces banks to step up mortgage modifications and bans acquisitions of healthy competitors until the taxpayer is repaid.It might have been even harsher, had Mr Geithner not fought off calls by White House aides who wanted to, for instance, set firm lending targets.
Then the deal encountered another roadblock: In a notice issued in February, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the industry watchdog, told the country's five biggest lenders, including Bank of China, that it would step up regulation of their overseas acquisitions and investments.
Now, the retailing giant of the Middle East is making another acquisition to step up its game in e-commerce.
During its big customer event in Europe, VMware announced another acquisition to step up its game in helping enterprises build and run containerised, Kubernetes-based architectures: it has acquired Heptio, a startup out of Seattle that was co-founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were two of the three people who co-created Kubernetes back at Google in 2014 (it has since been open sourced).
