Are mergers and acquisitions contagious?- Conceptualising parallel M&As among customers and suppliers

Mapping the number of completed mergers and acquisitions (M&As) over the past few decades would produce a line roughly following the fluctuations of the business cycle. The most recent peak was marked by the numerous M&As occurring in the late 1990s and in early 2000 (Bengtsson and Skärvad 2001; Weston and Weaver 2001), followed by the recession starting in late 2000 (Sevenius 2003; Lundell 2002; KPMG Corporate Finance 2003; Förvärv & fusioner 2004). Weston and Weaver (2001) describe this development as M&A waves, and refer to the most recent peak of mergers and acquisitions as the fifth M&A wave. Different peaks in the history of M&A have had different foci. In the 1960s and 1970s, diversification and the creation of conglomerates were common reasons for merging with or acquiring other companies (Shleifer & Vishny, in Rumelt, Schendel and Teece 1994; Weston and Weaver 2001). In the age of economic globalisation, the M&As of the late 1990s and early 2000 were more international in scope, involving companies from more than one country; they were also more focused on bringing intra-industry companies together (Bengtsson and Skärvad 2001; Sevenius 2003). The intra-industry focus on M&As could stand as a description for the concentration in e.g. the automotive industry and the IT-sector in the late 1990s. But is this all we see