Authors: Masaaki Takemura; Masae Takimoto; Yoritoshi Hara
The purpose of this paper is to show how a manager played an important role in the process of M&A. Through our five-year field research on an M&A case in Japan, we found that managers play a crucial role in facilitating successful interactions between the acquiring and acquired firms.Through our case study, we found that a relatively small acquired company could influence the corporate culture of the larger company merging with or acquiring it. KOBAYASHI Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. (henceforth, KOBAYASHI) acquired KIRIBAI Chemical Co. Ltd. (henceforth, KIRIBAI) in 2001, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of KOBAYASHI. The first intention of this acquisition was to gain a novel corporate culture that KOBAYASHI did not have: the unique competence in marketing and product development of KIRIBAI. This transfer of corporate culture, however, did not work automatically or as intended. An interaction manager, as called in this paper, played an important role in the transfer.We expect that our findings will contribute to the academics in two main ways. The first way is in regards to M&A management. Orthodox understandings of M&A’s purposes are that they are basically for efficiency: production and distribution costs, financial motivations, market power, and so on. According to these understandings, the acquired company vanishes. Our case showed the acquired, small-sized company still influenced the acquiring company. The second way is related to traditional IMP research. Though M&A is undoubtedly interaction management, there are rarely any studies on M&A by researchers in the IMP group, except a small amount of excellent studies. We will show some important roles that an interaction manager took on in the M&A interaction process.
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)