Success Factors of International Mergers and Acquisitions

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Ingolstadt, language: English, abstract: At the beginning of 2010 the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported a total volume of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) volume for 2009 of 239.9 billion US-dollars. Even if this sounds like a huge volume the global M&A market was considerably affected by the economic crisis and decreased by 66% compared to the volume of 2008 where we had a total volume of 706.5 billion US-dollars of cross-border sales (UNCTAD, 2010a). The following chart shows that international M&A's play a significant role in todays economy. Beside that a quarterly survey conducted by Hewitt Associates showed up that 54% of European headquartered organizations evaluated already completed transactions as not as successful as they were intended to be and did not reach the initial financial and strategic objectives (Hewitt Associates, 2010). Why do companies still do international M&A s even if it seems that they fail to reach their targets in so many cases? The target of this essay is to evaluate why M&A s are still so important for businesses and to show up that the success of international M&A s is dependent on more than the financial evaluation of the organisations involved. Therefore this essay provides some basics on international M&A s including types of M&A s, according processes and expected benefits. Based on that it evaluates the human side of M&A s and how this influences the successful implementation.