Submitted by: Submitted by assifosman
Views: 550
Words: 2889
Pages: 12
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 05/15/2011 01:15 PM
HP-Compaq Merger – Final paper of the Strategic Management course – Assif Osman, May 2011
INTRODUCTION
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A’s) are the most dominant inorganic growth strategies. However, most of them fail. This is a fact that can be read on many studies conducted by many reputable consulting companies. In this framework, it becomes even more important to analyze the processes that can lead to successful mergers. This paper discusses the Merger between HP and Compaq in 2002. Such a big and bold merger had never taken place before in the technology industry. The challenges for this merger were really interesting and many aspects of the whole process are unique and worth analyzing. That analysis can certainly be helpful in identifying good and bad practices for conducting merger processes. Most of the information was sourced by study cases, both by Stanford Graduate School of business and Harvard Business School. I will try to relate the most relevant facts of the merger with the conceptual framework acquired during the Strategic Management course and some extra readings. From that relation and using some own intuitive analysis, I will make some remarks, throughout the paper, about the merger process, trying to identify the good practices and things that could have been done differently.
THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Before getting to the actual analysis of the merger, it is, in my opinion, important to make a quick reference to the four sequential but also coevolving processes that capture the strategic dynamics of an acquisition integration (Figure 1). These processes were suggested by Robert Burgelman and Webb Mckiney in their arcticle “Managing the Strategic Dynamics of Acquisition Integration”. Below is a quick description of each process.
Figure 1 – The Critical processes of acquisition integration
Formulating the integration logic and perfomance goals This process involves not only ensuring that the merger makes strategic sense, in terms of...