Improving corporate performance through M&A growth strategies
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2023
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Accounting
Language
en
Pages
81+5
Series
Abstract
This thesis set out to study the effects of mergers and acquisitions to development of operating performance of companies after the transaction. Even though there are vast amounts of academic literature on the topic of mergers and acquisition regarding the gains that shareholders receive as an outcome of these transactions, only a minority of them focuses on studying the effects on operating performance to find out whether the expected synergies are actually achieved after the merger. The topic of improving operating performance as a result of mergers and acquisitions have been debated in the academia and previous studies such as Healy et al. (1992) suggest significant positive effect whereas Ghosh (2001) did not find such effect. In this research I decided to take a new approach to the issue and divided these corporate transactions into four different categories based on their selected grow strategy: vertical growth, horizontal growth, concentric diversification, or conglomerate diversification. I gathered a sample of 200 largest corporate transactions between US listed companies that were completed in 2015 – 2017 and divided them to the forementioned categories. After this I compared the post transaction development of return on equity using DuPont’s formula to find out how each growth strategy affects the post-merger return on equity its component ratios. In the end, results of the data analysis failed in finding any significant differences between the strategic approaches. Main findings concluded that mergers and acquisitions utilising vertical growth or concentric diversification strategies are clearly underrepresented among all transactions. Also, there is a significant variance in the outcome for every growth strategy, and using T-test, median test and analysis of variances, this study was unable to determine if there is one strategy that would generally be more beneficial than others. Further research utilising the division into growth strategies should be conducted in order to better able to differentiate between the transaction and provide information for management and investors to be able to manage their expectation relating to a transaction.Description
Thesis advisor
Beyer, BiancaIkäheimo, Seppo
Keywords
merger, acquisition, M&A, operating performance, growth strategy