Finance essay on Mergers and Acquisition Assignment

Finance essay on Mergers and Acquisition - Assignment Example According to Roll (2009), between 1996 and 2001, there were over 57,000 alliances and 74,000 acquisitions in the US with a combined value of $12 trillion. Milner (2010) further notes that even in the wake of the 2009 financial depression, the value of top 10 merger and acquisition deals exceeded $1 billion. T...... In the UK for instance, the body charged with the examination of mergers and acquisition lies in the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, formerly Monopolies and Mergers Commission (Griffiths & Wall 2004). A merger is a form of strategy where firms, usually of equal magnitude mutually integrate their business operations on a co-equal basis. On the other hand, the acquisition strategy involves a firm buying control rights or 100% stake from another with the intention of making the newly acquired firm a component of its business portfolio (Schuler & Jackson 2001). On completion of the acquisition cycle, the management of the acquiring firm becomes the power answerable to. While Griffiths and Wall (2004) consider acquisition and take-over as the synonyms in business, Hitt, Ireland and Hoskinsson differentiate the two by introducing the aspect of no soliciting or otherwise â€Å"unfriendly acquisition† in reference to a take-over (2011, pg.189). Albeit Griffiths and Wall (2004, p.74) claim that mergers and acquisitions account for â€Å"50% of the increase in assets and 60% of the increase in industrial concentration,† Carey et al. (2001) argue that there has been minimal research on performance of organisations in post-acquisition period with Hitt et al. (2009) and Weston, Siu and Johnson (2001) arguing that averagely, firms would create little or no value through mergers and acquisitions. Case Study: Apple’s Acquisition of Lala Media Inc. Introduction to the acquisition Apple Inc. is a 1976 Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak founded US based Multinational Corporation dealing with designing and selling personal computers, computer software and consumer electronics. Among its major hardware products include Macintosh