Is it transformative or not? The characteristics of private equity investors’ acquisition planning
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2018
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Management and International Business (MIB)
Language
en
Pages
99
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Abstract
The acquisitions by private equity backed companies are increasingly popular, in both practice and academic research. The academic literature on the topic is emerging in the field of finance, focusing on topics such as probability of acquisitions and the acquisitions’ effects on performance by using quantitative methods. However, the current research lacks understanding on how the private equity investors use the acquisitions in their investment from a qualitative perspective. This study answers this call by studying how the private equity investors plan the overall acquisition behavior of their portfolio firms to understand how the potentially high numbers of acquisitions are managed. In order to do that, the literature on private equity is combined with literature on planning of mergers and acquisitions. The study is a qualitative multiple case study of five portfolio firms, which are or have been invested in by a private equity fund. The data is collected through open interviews with the private equity investors of the case firms. Additional data is collected from public sources and databases. The results show that the private equity investors are mainly strategic in their planning of the acquisition behavior of the portfolio firms. The level of involvement of the private equity investor varies from hands-on work to overseeing role, depending on the acquisition experience of the portfolio firm. Interestingly, the private equity investors did not consider all of the acquisitions of same importance, but the division between transformative and non-transformative acquisitions was clear. The role adopted by the private equity investor also depends on this categorization: in transformative acquisitions, the private equity investors were active and highly involved. The non-transformative acquisitions were often left to the portfolio firms to manage.Description
Thesis advisor
Kähäri, PerttuKeywords
private equity, mergers, acquisitions, planning, roles, management