Mergers & Acquisitions

Antecedents of M&A success: The role of strategic complementarity, cultural fit, and degree and speed of integration

“…Although the number of transactions has declined through the current financial and economic crisis, there is strong evidence that a new M&A wave has already started. However, it is not the big transactions—which are quite prominent in the media—that create the enormous volume in the market for corporate control (e.g., US$1.78 trillion in 2011, according to Bloomberg), but it is rather the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) transactions from which this amount mainly derives (Jansen, ). Even though SMEs play an important role for the European economy—e.g., they represent 99 percent of all European companies (Avram and Kühne, ), and the last M&A wave was mainly SME driven (Jansen, ; Salvato, Lassin, and Wiklund, )—they are broadly ignored in current research.…”

“…However, it is not the big transactions—which are quite prominent in the media—that create the enormous volume in the market for corporate control (e.g., US$1.78 trillion in 2011, according to Bloomberg), but it is rather the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) transactions from which this amount mainly derives (Jansen, ). Even though SMEs play an important role for the European economy—e.g., they represent 99 percent of all European companies (Avram and Kühne, ), and the last M&A wave was mainly SME driven (Jansen, ; Salvato, Lassin, and Wiklund, )—they are broadly ignored in current research. Success rates of M&As are poor in general, and it is regularly reported that on average 40–60 percent of M&As fail in creating value (Bagchi and Rao, ; Bower, ); some authors even speak of failure rates between of 70 and 90 percent (Christensen et al ., ).…”

The impact of industry-wide and target market environmental hostility on entrepreneurial leadership in mergers and acquisitions

“…For researching the phenomena of interest, we study a sample of 115 acquisitions conducted between 2008 and 2011 by medium sized enterprises from manufacturing branches situated in the German speaking part of central Europe. Up to date the major part of empirical contributions to M&A research focus on larger corporations, although small and medium sized companies make up for a considerable amount of M&A transactions in the Germanspeaking part of Europe (Jansen, 2008) and have been shown to differ regarding transaction related issues (Bauer et al, forthcoming).…”

“…Comparing these statistics to officially available data, it can be concluded that the sample reflects the acquisition behavior of rather low-tech industries in Austria, Germany and Switzerland quite well. First, the relatively small relative size of the target firms reflects the general tendency of smaller acquisitions in Europe (Bothwick & Leibowitz, 2017), second, the annual sales reflect the importance of mid-sized acquirers in the German-speaking countries (Jansen, 2008), third, the target countries mirror data from official M&A statistics (e.g. Düsterhoff, 2014), and fourth, the reported average industry growth rates reflect the economic situation in the Germanspeaking countries and the corresponding industries well (e.g.…”