Leonardo Fernando Cruz Basso, Evelyn Seligmann-Feitosa, Diógenes Bido,

Aiming for superior performance, companies need to have and skillfully use rare, valuable, irreplaceable and inimitable resources, with special emphasis on intangibles, constructed in lengthy and risky processes or strategically accumulated via Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). To analyze how financial performance, after 36 months of M&A, is related to the previous existence/disclosure of intangibles, we investigated one hundred and seventy-seven companies were in fifty-nine cases of M&A occurred in France among 1997 and 2007. We built textual-based indicators of disclosure and we used financial measures of intangibles existence to compare their explanatory power for growth and corporate profitability (performance dimensions analyzed). Using Structural Equations, via Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS), we find positive relationships among these indicators, validating the strategic option for the M&A