 Why History Repeats Itself: Acquisition Trends, Successes and FailuresNancy Hubbard Chapter 1 in Acquisition, 1999, pp 6-17 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract The current acquisition climate means that history is being rewritten daily with the announcement of each new ‘mega-merger’, but this is only history repeating itself: in the past, companies have consolidated on national lines; this time it is on a global basis. It will be interesting to see what the success rates will be of these mega-mergers — will they surpass the much touted 50 per cent success rate of the average deal? I think not, for, as we have seen, although there is often a logical strategic fit in these deals, their success relies very heavily on a well-run implementation process and the human resource (HR) function in order to oversee the raft of redundancies, relocations and reprocessing which is inherent to an economies of scale acquisition. Most acquirers do not give this element of the transaction the time or importance it deserves. As will be discussed in this chapter, perhaps this is why poor implementation and HR issues account for such a large percentage of acquisition failures. First, let us look at the history of acquisition trends. Keywords: Target Company; Merger Activity; Acquisition Success; Leverage Buyout; Merger Wave (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-14870-7_2 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-14870-7_2 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan |
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