Tobias Herdt

Strategic Corporate Communications in Mergers & Acquisitions Tobias Herdt

Diplomarbeit, die am 13.06.2003 erfolgreich an einer Internationale Wirtschaftshochschule in Niederlande im Fachbereich Wirtschaft eingereicht wurde. Summary: M&A transactions and corporate change are frequent occurrences in the globalized economies of today (c.f. section 'External growth and communication as global trends', page 1). On a global scale, led by the U. S., the European Union and Germany, M&A transactions have clearly become a global mega trend. Despite their growing popularity, M&A transactions often fail to produce the desired outcomes (c.f. section 'M&A Failure and Corporate Communications', page 5). This is partly due to poor M&A communication. The study at hand has several aims: To discuss the significance of M&A communication for the overall success of a transaction To establish the general determinants for the quality of M&A communication - The key success factors To examine the individual determinants - The factors determining the quantitative and qualitative deployment of M&A communication and its adjustment to the varying preconditions of different transactions Secondary as well as primary data led to the conclusion that M&A communication is of high significance to the success of an M&A transaction and can impact its results. Even if M&A communication can never be the single most important factor, determining merger success or failure, corporations acknowledging the significance of best-practice M&A communication have a higher M&A success probability and avoid opportunity costs. As described in more detail in section 'The significance of M&A communication for the overall success of a transaction', page 51, M&A communication derives its significance from the functions it fulfills. In the course of the interviews, those functions could be identified as reputation function, manipulation function, information function, acceptance function