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Mergers, Construction, Manufacture, Natural Resources And Technology

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1 Introduction Since the early 20th century, mergers began to play a great role in the development of modern corporations in different fields such as foods, construction, manufacture, natural resources and technology. A merger can be defined as the absorption of one firm by another (Ross, Westerfield and Jeffrey, 2002). The acquiring firm maintains its name and identity, and it obtains all the assets and liabilities of the target company. The acquired company no longer exists as an independent entity. While mergers could be categorized into three types: horizontal mergers, vertical mergers and conglomerate mergers. Horizontal merger means that a firm takes over another firm in the same industry and at the same stage of the production …show more content…

Other companies, however, merge in order to reduce the agency costs, which seem not for sound economic reasons. This essay is an attempt to argue that the majority of companies merge for sound economic reasons, whereas some might merge for other reasons. The rest of this essay is as follows. In order to show the importance of mergers to social economic development and corporate growth, section 2 will outline the development of merger activities and volume of corporate mergers in European and American market. Section 3 will focus on the sound economic reasons of three different types of mergers to discuss their important role in corporate mergers. Section 4 will introduce the concern of reducing the agency cost via mergers to display other possible motives for mergers and section 5 will conclude. 2 Development of merger activities The merger activities have presented upwards or downwards trends and created some specific merger waves. A series of merger waves has been witnessed to in numerous countries. For example, the merger waves of the US, with a worldwide economic impact, have been characterized by five major waves or periods of typical merger activities process (Drogalas et al, 2006). This essay now turns to outline the volume of mergers in American and European Market during the fifth merger wives, which are mainly led by global strategy of corporations in

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