Applied research methods for Business and management Essay

Applied research methods for Business and management - Essay Example The 2006 record high of global acquisitions indicates the rampancy of Mergers and Acquisitions in the recent past (Saigol and Politti, 2007). The value of worldwide acquisitions stood at more than 4 trillion US dollars in this year. Out of the 4 trillion US dollars, 1.3 trillion US dollars worth of acquisitions were cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions (Saigol and Politti, 2007). The consistency of the trend spread to the first fiscal quarter of 2007 when acquisitions were valued at 1.13 trillion US dollars; making this fiscal quarter the busiest in the history of acquisitions (Henry, 2002). The value of completed acquisitions in the past two decades exceeds that of completed deals in the prior 30 years (Child et al., 2001). However, this recent upsurge comes along with the fact that about 80 percent of acquisition deals are unsuccessful (KPMG, 1999). Most empirical studies suggest that the reason for the immense failure in acquisitions is majorly the acquirers’ poor anticipation of the most probable challenges in the post-acquisition stages (Shimizu et al., 2004). The high failure rates coupled with the simultaneous high rampancy of acquisition transactions makes the concept of Mergers and Acquisitions an unexplained paradox (Arika, 2004). Academic and economic research efforts indicate that despite the failure of most acquisitions to achieve the objectives set in the pre-acquisition stage, Cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions continue being popular and remain the main strategy multinational corporations use to invest directly in foreign countries (Rottig and Reus, 2005). The concurrent successes and failures of Cross-border Mergers and Acquisitions beg for a well-targeted research study to examine the main causal factors for the high failure rates (Larsson and Risberg, 1998). Additionally, while numerous research hours have been devoted to the study of Cross-border