Acquisitions: how should a project be successfully executed?

The purpose of the article is to identify and systematize the terms of successful acquisitions on the enterprise market, along with making their classification into the necessary (which enable reaching synergy) and additional conditions (increasing the level of synergy or optimizing the process of obtaining it).

The methodology is based on direct interviews with the CEO, CFO and COOs. The surveys were carried out between the year 2000 and 2010 in a few tens of companies conducting acquisitions. The aim was to answer the question of whether the individual conditions of successful transactions were carried out and what were the results of acquisitions from the perspective of changes in the expected value (or observed) by the buyer. There has also been used the personal experience of the authors as participants in the acquisition on the sides of both, the buyer and the purchased.

The results allowed us to identify key conditions for success at each stage of the transaction process (critical success factors (CSF)). They also made it possible to classify the terms according to the criterion of their significance. The results clearly show that the cost-effective acquisition processes at the same time require fulfilling a number of conditions. The lack of synergetic effects of these conditions may decide not possible to obtain the expected increase in value in the purchasing process.

The research was conducted in a wide spectrum of companies, regardless of the ongoing activities in the industry, mainly on the Polish market. This means that the findings and recommendations are universally applicable, provided that some of the proposals may relate in particular to the so-called emerging markets.

The practical application of recommendations given in the paper will allow to reduce the risk and abridge the scale of failures in the acquisition processes. The attention is drawn to the practical implications of the pitfalls to which the managers who decide on and carry out complex processes of capital investments may be exposed.

As a result of literature and empirical research as well as the article's authors' own experience as experts, there has been proposed a comprehensive model of the most important behaviors conditioning the success of the acquisition in the context of building the shareholder value. This very model organizes the past experience of the M&A market, classifies the important factors in the M&A processes according to their effect on the value, and it supplements them with new elements, allowing the construction of a sustainable competitive advantage of the organization.