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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia

Business Growth Strategy

330 notes

University of Virginia

Business Growth Strategy

330 notes

Cours 3 sur 5 dans Specialization Business Strategy

Get the tools you need to analyze, evaluate and recommend specific actions organizations can take to grow their value and avoid common growth pitfalls. Learn to determine how best to build value, whether by scaling existing markets, entering established markets or creating new markets through innovation and acquisitions. Apply these concepts in case studies of industry leaders JetBlue, Starbucks, Intel Corporate Venturing and Tata Motors.

À partir de la leçon

Growth through Acquisition

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are common--but rarely successful--ways firms attempt to grow their business. In this module, we'll show you the pros and cons of M&A, suggest valid alternatives, and outline effective M&A strategies. Using the Acquisitions Analysis tool, you'll be able to assess the impact of a potential M&A and avoid common pitfalls of this type of growth. Through an analysis of the Tata Motors case, you'll have a chance to apply this tool to determine an effective growth strategy.

Growing through Acquisition6:38

Pros and Cons of Acquisitions5:54

Pitfalls of Growth Through Acquisition7:12

Why Firms Overpay for Acquisitions5:41

Alternatives to Acquisition7:05

Identifying Successful Acquisition Opportunities3:05

Acquisition Analysis5:39

Strategic Benefit: Value of the Target2:13

Avoiding Overpaying4:26

Acquisition Analysis: Opportunity Costs6:33

Module Lessons4:54

Rencontrer les enseignants

Michael Lenox
Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Darden School of Business
Jared Harris
Samuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Darden School of Business

We've been talking about growth through acquisition.

And this is an increasingly common feature of the economic landscape all

around the world.

And therefore, it's oftentimes a common part of a particular business's strategy.

And we walked through an acquisition analysis.

This is a tool in your toolkit to help you think through the potential pros and

cons of a particular acquisition.

And think about the benefits and the costs.

And so, as we've done all of that I think several key themes have emerged.

Let's revisit some of the key themes as we've talked about growth through

acquisition.

First of all, again growth through acquisition is a common growth strategy.

It's potentially the most common growth strategy.

If a firm wants to grow into a particular product market or

geographic market, often times they attempt to do that through acquisition.

Why do they do that?

Because mergers and

acquisitions can be an effective way to enter that in your market.

Oftentimes it's a way to overcome or bypass entry barriers, and

so oftentimes that's the reason that it's attempted.

But again, caution is in order.

Acquisitions are often attempted, but they're much less frequently successful.

We know that on average, most acquisitions fail.

Why do they fail?

Well, acquisitions can fail for many reasons.

First of all, it might simply be the wrong target.

It's just not the right combination of businesses.

There's not an obvious benefit to combining the businesses.

They might have very different incompatible business models.

And there's all kinds of bad acquisitions that just should have been

avoided in the first place.

Also, a problem for

acquisition success might be just the difficulty of implementation.

Often times it's easy to underestimate how hard it will be to just put

those firms together, to integrate their operations, to sort of merge the cultures.

There are a lot of things about post-merger integration that are very

difficult.

Looks easy on paper.

Much more difficult in practice.

So that can be the Achilles heel of a lot of acquisitions as well.

Another problem with acquisitions is simply over payment.

It's very common for an acquiring firm to just pay too much for that target firm.

And once they incur all the additional costs of integration,

all those costs of success as it were.

It just adds up to something that ends up being a net negative.

When contemplating an acquisition,

you should carefully consider the alternatives.

In other words, there are other ways to go here.

And you should make sure you carefully consider those other alternative

strategies.

For instance, maybe you could achieve the same strategic

objective through organic growth.

You might just focus your time and resources and energy on innovation, or

scaling your existing business model.

Just simply doing more of what you do in more markets.

You might alternatively consider a strategic alliance.

Maybe that's a potentially less risky,

less expensive way to enter a new product or geographic market.

We can find a strategic partner and put some sort of an agreement together,

to work together and share the revenues.

So these are alternatives to growth through acquisition,

and it may be that they're better alternatives.

Again, you have to carefully think about the pros and the cons and

think about whether one of these routes is a better route to go

than the risky route of making that potential acquisition.

A successful acquisition requires clarity.

It requires clarity about how it will create value.

Remember it goes back to this basic idea and

strategy of what generates a valuable competitive position.

When you're thinking about a potential acquisition,

you need to really confront whether that acquisition is going to enhance the value

of your existing competitive position.

The strategic benefits of an acquisition should exceed the purchase price and

the other costs associated with that acquisition.

That seems like sort of an intuitively obvious idea, but

an acquisition analysis is at its heart a cost benefit analysis.

Do the benefits outweight the costs?

If they do, you might think about going forward, but that's not enough.

That strategic benefit less the acquisition costs,

should also be more attractive to you than the other strategic options.

This is, in other words, a way of thinking about opportunity cost.

Are there other strategies you should pursue instead of making this acquisition?

And would those create more value or lead to better growth opportunities.?

And finally, again, post-merger integration is extremely difficult, but

it's critically important for success.

Don't underestimate the difficulty associated with

integrating those two firms' business operations, their cultures, and

all the things to make that combined operation in the future successful.

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