Which motives initiate managers to merge or to acquire other corporations? Florian Geiger gives a comprehensive overview about mergers and acquisitions in the machinery industry evaluating merger motives, benefits, and success of transactions. He closes the gap between theory and practice providing insights into merger rent generation on an empirical as well as a case study basis. He empirically tests a unique dataset of 330 machinery mergers using state-of-the-art statistical analysis providing many intriguing and surprising results. Both, theoretical and related empirical evidence provided serve as a starting point and guideline for future merger decision and evaluation in the machinery industry.

Autorentext
Dr. Florian Geiger obtained his doctorate at the finance department of the European Business School (ebs) and works as a management consultant focusing on merger preparation.

Zusammenfassung
Which motives initiate managers to merge or to acquire other corporations? While there is a long-lasting history of empirical research on M&A in a cross-industry context, our knowledge about industry specific drivers of M&A is more than limited. Given this background, the machinery industry is an attractive segment to address questions on M&A motives as it is on the one hand a very fragmented industry and on the other hand a bundle of in some parts highly consolidated sub-industries. In his thesis, Mr. Geiger makes an effort to answer the question why firms in the machinery industry follow M&A strategies and how successful they are in their transactions. This is not only a remarkable endeavour because Mr. Geiger uses some hand selected unique datasets, but in particular, because he presents state-of-the-art analyses which are competitive and meet highest international standards. The thesis on hand carefully identifies and addresses open research questions related to M&A strategies ina very specific industry. Its primary objective was to identify M&A motives for different types of companies in various sub-segments of the machinery industry by analyzing stock price and accounting data. Thusly objectifying managerial action allows deriving recommendations for financing practice.

Inhalt
The Influence of Industry Concentration on Merger Motives.- Corporate Relatedness and Wealth Creation in Machinery Mergers.- Horizontal acquisitions, merger rents, and non-price competition a case study from the machinery industry.- Concluding remarks.