LCII Brown Bag seminar series

The next LCII brown bag seminar on “Mergers in the Digital Economy” presented by Joé Lamesch (ULiege) will take place on:

Time: (exceptionally) Thursday March 28th, 2019 at 13.00PM-2.15PM

Location: LCII room

Abstract: This paper analyses the M&A strategy of the five largest tech firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Using their public annual reports as well as an online database on the tech sector, we proceed in a two-step approach. First, we identify 6 different user group that gravitate around these multi-sided companies. Matching these user groups with revenue streams of firms we distinguish between their most important market segments. In a second step, we track their mergers and acquisitions for the years 2015, 2016 and 2017, collect information on the target firms and their products. This enables us to classify their acquisition cases according to the prior defined market segments. Additionally, we check whether the target’s product was discontinued or not, and whether they invest in new technologies like artificial intelligence or virtual reality. The resulting patterns seem to suggest that these five firms use their M&A activity mostly to strengthen their current business models. Only rare are cases that could be seen as attempts to expand their activities into new market segments.

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