Corporate Acquisitions and Market Relationships

This paper aims at analysing and understanding corporate acquisition strategy adopting a process view centred on the role of customer and supplier relationships of the acquired companies: in particular, we focus on the effects that an acquisition process produces on main customer and supplier relationships of the acquired company and thus on its market position. Within different literature approaches in the field of financing, strategic management, industrial economics and organization, companies’ structural variables such as size, sector, culture, goals, have been mainly isolated as influencing acquisitions’ results, valued in terms of profitability. A more recent multiperspective approach is rather process-oriented. It views acquisition’s results - in terms of value creation and subsequent improvement of company’s market positioning – as depending on the quality of the acquisition process and in particular on the integration process, rather than on structural elements. Its main focus is however on companies’ “internal” variables and little attention is given to customer and supplier relationships as companies’ resources which are to be combined and integrated. Based on a sample of 12 acquisition processes involving acquired companies with a dense networks of downstream and upstream relationships with a number of actors, we aim at investigating if and how these supplier and customer relationships may be affected by acquisition processes. We also want to identify major variables which determine re-actions in company’s relationship counterparts and changes in the net of relationships.