Mergers and Acquisitions in Practice

13Does Acquisition Experience Matter?

From yes or no to why, when, and how

Florian Bauer, Andreas Strobl, and Kurt Matzler

Introduction

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) remain an essential strategy for corporate development, enabling many firms to cope with changing environments, markets, and technologies (Bauer and Matzler, 2014; Swaminathan et al., 2008; Weber and Drori, 2011). For example, in 2010 General Electric announced a plan to invest about US$30 billion over the next three years on acquisitions in order to cope with market developments. Like GE, other global players as well as medium-sized firms have spent billions of dollars on non-organic growth strategies (Jansen, 2008). This overall importance of M&A is demonstrated by the annual ...