The Impacts of Business Risks on Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisition (M&As) are one of the most important strategies of corporate expansion and growth, also known as an external capital investment. M&As are normally create value to shareholders and corporations. The high investment returns of M&As means the high business risks. However, the practical evidences indicate that roughly half merger movements fail, based on the shareholder maximization perspective. There are four major business risks may challenge the success of merger, which include market risk, strategic risk, financial risk and corporate culture risk. The previous studies focus on the influence of financial risk and corporate culture risk. In the financial risk, premium overpayment and method of payment are the two most significant factors. Culture conflicts may cause the communication problems cross the new combined companies, which eventually reduce the productive and efficiency of the performance. Those two risks may erode the shareholder value, resulting the failure of merger movement. Our research use both qualitative and quantitative research method to investigate the effects of financial factor and culture factor on abnormal returns. The sample of 100 completed merger and acquisition deals collected from the database ZEPHYR by using SPSS and Stata. The findings are generally consistent with the theories and the empirical evidences. Premium overpayment is the most significant financial reason for the failure of merger, followed by stock payment method. Culture conflicts are the main reason causing the merger failure of Daimler-Chrysler. Our study has indicates the importance of risk analysis pre-merger and risk control post-merger. Risk management is therefore particular important for merger and acquisition