Summary.
Reprint: R1103B Companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year, yet the M&A failure rate is between 70% and 90%. Executives can dramatically increase their odds of success, the authors argue, if they understand how to select targets, how much to pay for them, and whether and how to integrate them. The most common reasons for making an acquisition include holding on to a premium position or cutting costs. But to realize those benefits, the acquirer needs to achieve economies of scale by absorbing the target’s resources into its operations. CEOs, who are often unrealistic about the performance boost from such acquisitions, must be sure not to pay too much for them. A less-familiar reason for making an acquisition is to fundamentally change a company’s growth trajectory. In those deals, the acquirer uses the target’s business model as a platform for growth. Because the business models with the most transformative potential are often disruptive, they can be difficult to evaluate, and CEOs often believe that such acquisitions are overpriced. In fact, however, those are the ones that can pay off spectacularly.When a CEO wants to boost corporate performance or jump-start long-term growth, the thought of acquiring another company can be extraordinarily seductive. Indeed, companies spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions every year. Yet study after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90%. A lot of researchers have tried to explain those abysmal statistics, usually by analyzing the attributes of deals that worked and those that didn’t. What’s lacking, we believe, is a robust theory that identifies the causes of those successes and failures.