Исследование процессов слияний и поглощений: вызовы и возможные решения

Relevance of the study
Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are primarily a tool that many companies have in their arsenal and are ready to use and implement. A company always has a choice: to resort to an internal development using only internal resources, for example R&D processes and other internal improvements or the construction of new facilities, or rely on the merger or acquisition of another company which already owns all the necessary assets, know-how, local presence on a new market (for the candidate company). In any case, the company must always be ready to meet the needs of a changing market environment, to exceed the development of competitors and the market, or at least to maintain the current economic situation.
Consequently, M&As have become an increasingly broad-based phenomenon, and their numbers are growing dramatically elsewhere throughout the globe. A substantial goal of M&A is to create a synergy between the acquirer and the target and managers in companies across the world usually claim their M&A decisions are strategically important for increasing the value of the company. Every year companies spend huge amounts of money on mergers and acquisitions in spite of the fact that between 70 and 90 per cent fail to deliver shareholder value (Joshi et al., 2020) and 53% actually destroyed value (Marks & Mirvis, 2011).
As it was said before, company should always understand the reasons of potential merger, benefits and impacts of such a merger. What is more important that firms have also to think about future impacts on company overall performance, because there are many stakeholders, which are interested in superior performance of company, such as shareholders, owners of the business, debt holders, employees and government, who wants taxes from your business.
Taking all above mentioned into account we can observe a paradoxical picture: M&A is a phenomenon appears to be simple for the first sight, but is very complex in its true nature. Literature is vast, spanning over half a century of research endeavor and drawing upon multiple disciplinary perspectives, numerous mature paradigms and theoretical approaches to their implementation have been created (Eisenhardt & Zbaracki, 1992). Despite it, the field suffers from a lack of connectedness and consistency. There is limited understanding of the challenges of the M&A process (Gomes et al., 2013).
This becomes especially true if we look at the aftermath of the epidemiological and economic crisis that began at the end of 2019 and still continues to strongly affect the way things are. The industry of mergers and acquisitions did not stand aside and was heavily
influenced as well, in particular, the processes of realizing the deals changed hugely. To get
7
high-quality deals completed, companies in-flight adopt digital networking technologies to switch to the virtual working environment and recruit local stationed deal-making talent. Though technology can never completely overtake in-person deal making, many of the latest virtual ways of operating with M&A processes are here to stay (Harding et al., 2021). The last year saw the continuation and, in many cases, the hastening of longer-terms trends; certainly, the COVID-19 crisis played a big role in this. It may take several years before we fully understand the far-reaching ramifications of a year during which every aspect of the corporate M&A process was disrupted.
Overall, the following facts determine the relevance of the study:
• a big proportion of M&A deals are considered unsuccessful and the reasons behind it are still unclear and not enough investigated;
• challenges are still very fragmented and refer to different aspects and stages of the M&A process;
• the COVID-19 crisis impacted greatly the whole M&A industry and completely changed the way how the deals are made and these changes are here to stay.
Research gap
After studying the existing knowledge on the topic, the author identified that the knowledge field on the subject matter is rather disproportionate: while there’s a solid research on the essence of M&A deals, their stages, common obstacles, and reasons to fail, there’s almost nothing said about the impact that the COVID-19 crisis had on the M&A procedure as a whole and the new challenges it posed for M&A executors. Therefore, adaptability of the previous research results to current environment is on question.
Research questions and goal of the study
In response to this, the research goal of this study is to understand how key steps within M&A process have changed during the COVID-19 crisis, what challenges new normality bring to M&A deal makers, and how potentially they could be solved
In order to reach stated goal, the study is aiming to answer the following research questions:
•
• •
How the particular steps of M&A process have been transformed during COVID-19 crisis?
What are the new challenges within stages of M&A process?
Are there ways of potentially resolving the new challenges of the M&A process?
8

In general, this work is aimed at investigating the new aspects of M&A phenomenon and gaining more comprehensive knowledge of the entire process in the new reality of post-COVID era. As subjects of study, we will consider the difficulties that arise at all stages of the process. The results expected from the study include a new understanding of the challenges of the merger and acquisition process and the development of a model following which management can optimize the process to make it smoother.
The thesis is divided into four parts, each of which contributes to the study’s goal and helps to answer research questions. The first part explores previous literature on the topics of M&A process in general, as well as on phases of the process, associated causes of failure, and challenges corresponding to each stage of M&A deal. In the second part the author presents the methodology used in the thesis, explains the research design, sampling criteria for the respondents, techniques used for data analysis, design of interviews and limitations of the research. In the third part the author provides the finding of the empirical study and present final conclusions and implications, including the results of the interviews and the list of managerial implications. The final part summarizes findings, present answers to the initial research questions, discuss theoretical and practical contribution of the thesis and provide recommendations for further research.