Re:Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B
by takinola on Thursday December 05, 2019 @11:59AM
(#21713919)
"half of all mergers destroy value"
I keep hearing this and it is from a widely misunderstood study. It did not find that half of all mergers destroyed value, instead, it found that only half of mergers created value. The proportion of mergers that destroyed value was much smaller (about 20% iirc). Unfortunately, most people did not bother looking beyond the headline and extrapolated incorrectly.
Re:Carbonite To Be Acquired by OpenText for $1.4B
by wpietri on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:09PM
(#21717172)
You appear to have the numbers backwards: https://www.theguardian.com/business/1999/nov/29/10
The acquire-and-cut-to-the-bone strategy is a good way to juice short-term numbers, but it's bad in the long term in that you destroy the drivers of long-term growth. All the execs get their bonuses and get to cash out their options at a high value, it's bad for everybody else in the long term: customers, employees, investors.
The theoretical justification for post-merger cuts has also been declining for some time. Improved computation and communication have made it much easier to outsource non-critical functions, so merged companies will have a lot redundancy today. E.g., in a merger 20 years ago, maybe two merged tech companies could consolidate data centers and get rid of a bunch of ops staff. Now maybe they get a slight improvement on their AWS bill and they can lose a few execs, but it's not nearly the same.
And let's not forget the diseconomies of scale. Everybody here should already know that small companies can innovate much more quickly than large ones. And mergers have their own costs; I consulted for a while for a company that grew mainly through mergers, and you cannot imagine the number of meetings that existed just to bridge fault lines between different legacy software, different teams, different offices. It was a mess.