Russian Acquisitions: Is There a Path To Success?
研究了俄罗斯企业收购的绩效，发现与美国企业类似，多数收购失败，但某些条件下俄罗斯收购方表现较好。
Estimates suggest that about 60% of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) eventually fail. Indeed, shareholders typically bid down share prices when management announces an acquisition. So why do managers initiate so many M&As when, on average, they fail? Many answers have been proposed: Managers like to build personal empires, managers don’t know what else to do with free cash fl ow, or they over-estimate the potential benefi ts and underestimate costs. Sometimes M&As are strategically necessary for survival: eat or be eaten. Finally, while most M&As end badly, not all do—some managers effectively capitalize on synergies with target fi rms, learn from them, or use targets to build market power. Regardless, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of what we know about M&As has been gleaned from big, publicly traded American fi rms. Naturally, this leads one to question whether M&A success rates are better elsewhere. And if the goal is to understand whether M&As fare better elsewhere, then it might make sense to tackle that question in a place that is very different from the United States. This is exactly what Oliver Bertrand (SKEEMA Business School in France and also St. Petersburg University in Russia) and Marie-Ann Betschinger (Higher School of Economics at Pokrovski Bulvar in Russia) did in examining the performance results of acquisitions by Russian fi rms. In their study, Bertrand and Betschinger set out to see if Russian fi rms had the same poor track record as their American counterparts. Moreover, they also wanted to learn if there were any conditions under which Russian acquirers did particularly well. Russia is important for a number of reasons. It is one of the “BRIC” nations, which also includes Brazil, India, and China, which Goldman Sachs has identifi ed as having rapidly expanding economies—so much so that they will be among the world’s economic superpowers in the coming decades. Plus, Russia accounted for 14% of emerging market M&A activity in 2010.