Paper info

Corporate Acquisitions and Market Relationships

Annalisa Tunisini and Roberta Bocconcelli

The paper was published at the 21st IMP-conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2005.

This paper aims at analysing and understanding corporate acquisition strategy adopting a processview centred on the role of customer and supplier relationships of the acquired companies: inparticular, we focus on the effects that an acquisition process produces on main customer andsupplier relationships of the acquired company and thus on its market position.Within different literature approaches in the field of financing, strategic management, industrialeconomics and organization, companies’ structural variables such as size, sector, culture, goals, havebeen mainly isolated as influencing acquisitions’ results, valued in terms of profitability. A more recentmultiperspective approach is rather process-oriented. It views acquisition’s results - in terms of valuecreation and subsequent improvement of company’s market positioning – as depending on the qualityof the acquisition process and in particular on the integration process, rather than on structuralelements. Its main focus is however on companies’ “internal” variables and little attention is given tocustomer and supplier relationships as companies’ resources which are to be combined andintegrated.Based on a sample of 12 acquisition processes involving acquired companies with a dense networksof downstream and upstream relationships with a number of actors, we aim at investigating if and howthese supplier and customer relationships may be affected by acquisition processes. We also want toidentify major variables which determine re-actions in company’s relationship counterparts andchanges in the net of relationships.