Результативность сделок по слияниям и поглощениям компаний, вышедших на IPO

An initial public offering (IPO) could be a desirable milestone for entrepreneurs, executives, board members and other stakeholders who see this process as a special achievement, which emphasizes their success and ability to manage the company. IPO allows the company to attract capital, increase liquidity, overcome borrowing constraints, cash-out insiders, and create acquisition currency among others. At the same time, IPO is a very costly process and the IPO companies are subject to greater regulation and coverage from research group and are obligated to report their performance to the investors so that competitors could capitalize on some disclosures. Thus, IPO is often a trade-off between all costs and benefits which must be considered before making such a decision.
Over the years 2000 – 2020 on the U.S. market the highest annual IPO numbers belong to the year 2020 and accounts for 480 deals. For the year 2021, there is a great opportunity to overcome this threshold as there are approximately 443 IPOs so far (Stock Analysis, 2021). The financial crisis of the 2008 year affected the desire of companies to become public badly as there were only 62 and 79 deals in the year 2008 and 2009 respectively. According to the EY article written by Go P. (2021), “Global IPO markets have benefited from the abundance of liquidity that was injected into the system by governments in the wake of the pandemic” (pp. 3) and the author also believes that the trend will continue in the year 2021. The same report states that “Q1 2021 has been the best-performing first quarter by deal numbers and proceeds in the last 20 years” (pp. 4).
At the same time, according to IMMA institute data (2021), M&A deals achieved their peak in terms of value and number of deals in the year 2007. After the drop in the year of 2008, the numbers were close to ones of the 2007 year in the year 2015. After that, the numbers of transactions and their value started to move in opposite directions over the years from 2016 to 2017: there is an increasing trend of M&A deals but with lower transaction values. Starting from the year 2018, both, number of transactions and their value decrease. M&A deals could be beneficial for some companies in the year 2021 thanks to decreasing in key rates of leading countries’ central banks. In addition, prospective takeover targets have become even more attractive in challenging environments, especially in industries such as high technology, telecommunications, digital media, and pharmaceuticals, according to the report by Bain & Company (2021).
There are some newly IPO companies which start to acquire other companies straight after the placement has been made. Additionally, the survey (Brau & Fawcett, 2006) found that the reason “to create public shares for use in future acquisitions” (pp. 407) was ranked as the top 1 answer of
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surveyed CFOs. After that, other researchers started to analyze this topic and tried to determine whether newly public firms participate in M&A deals and found approvals of that. Only one article was found which analyzed the influence of decision to acquire on the IPO company’s underperformance. The aim of the thesis is to fill the gap and contribute to establishing the relationship between the decision of newly IPO companies to acquire and such companies’ performance.
The research goal of the thesis is to determine whether the performance of newly public firms is affected by their acquisition activity within the first year of being public. To achieve the goal, the following objectives were introduced:
1. To study the concepts of both, IPO and M&A process;
2. To study the reasons and motives, which drive companies to conduct both, IPO and
M&A transactions;
3. To consider the impact of both types of deals on companies’ performance
4. To substantiate the research methodology and collect the data;
5. To formulate hypotheses and conduct the empirical study to test them;
6. To interpret and analyze the results of the research and provide theoretical and practical
conclusions.
The main sources of information are academic articles and books, analytical reports of financial and consulting companies, specialised financial and statistical websites; Refinitiv Eikon datastream, Zephyr and Capital IQ databases, companies’ reporting for Security Exchange Commission, a database of professor J. Ritter
The structure of the work is organized as follows: the first chapter is devoted to the IPO concepts, participants of the IPO process and their responsibilities, motives for companies to go public and performance of IPO companies; the second chapter is devoted to M&A concepts, value distribution in M&A deals, motives and impact of M&A deals on companies’ performance. In the third chapter, we transfer theoretical considerations to the practice and describe the methodology, sampling and empirical results which we obtained.