Strategic Motivation and Effectiveness Analysis of Microsoft's Acquisition of Activision Blizzard - An Empirical Study Based on Valuation and M&A Performance

Tong Tong ()
Additional contact information
Tong Tong: Massey College, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics

A chapter in Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Financial Innovation and Marketing Management (FIMM 2025), 2025, pp 1239-1252 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract As global technology companies become increasingly competitive in content and platform integration, strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have become an important means for large corporations to rapidly expand their ecosystems and technological capabilities. In 2022, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Activision Blizzard, a globally recognized gaming company, for approximately $68.7 billion, making it the largest M&A in the gaming industry to date. This paper takes this M&A event as the research object and systematically analyzes the motivation, valuation reasonableness and its impact of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. By analyzing the financial impact and market reaction of Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard, this paper points out that the deal will not only help Microsoft strengthen its layout in the mobile game and cloud game market, but also further enhance its content ecosystem and subscription service integration capability. The study shows that the acquisition embodies the typical strategic path of platform-based technology enterprises to acquire content resources and realize user ecological stickiness through acquisition, which is an important revelation for the future trend of M&A in the technology industry.

Keywords: Strategic Mergers and Acquisitions; Microsoft-Activision Blizzard Acquisition; Platform Ecosystem Expansion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:advbcp:978-94-6463-874-5_141

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789464638745

DOI: 10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_141

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().