Tag: m&a
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M&A doesn’t often work
[S]tudy after study puts the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions somewhere between 70% and 90%. The second, less familiar reason to acquire a company is to reinvent your business model and thereby fundamentally redirect your company. Almost nobody understands how to identify the best targets to achieve that goal, how much to pay for…
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Cisco not looking at Rackspace, doesn’t fit M&A criteria
“We don’t move into a market unless we think we have a realistic chance of gaining 40% market share with sustainable differentiation,” Chambers said at the Cisco Live conference when asked if the company needs to acquire an established cloud provider like Rackspace to succeed in cloud services. “And we try not to move into…
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In the M&A world, you kiss a lot of frogs
I like this post on what filling up the deal-flow pipeline for VCs looks like. For example, a good bozo bit heuristic: One of the reasons that a meeting doesn’t go well is that the founding team will say they expect $50 million in revenue in 5 years, but they have difficulty articulating how they’ll…
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Cash, Paranoia Fuel Tech Giants’ Buying Binge
Nice pice on disruption fear driven tech M&A: From messaging to watches and thermostats, Facebook and Google, along with Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., each want to own the digital platform where people communicate, shop and seek entertainment. The competition is driven by their ability to pay—their combined market capitalization exceeds $1 trillion—and long memories…
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More on the IBM x86 divestiture rationale
As usual, TPM is extensive, starting with: IBM is selling off the System x business, presumably because it is not profitable, but also because it is something it can sell while at the same time getting approximately 7,500 employees off its payrolls. Lenovo’s Peter Hortensius, who is president of the Think Business Group that sells…
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What do “strategy” people do, really?
Broadly speaking, CSO responsibilities fall into three categories—strategy development, resource allocation, and strategy execution—but activities within these three categories vary widely. (See Exhibit 1.) Most CSOs are responsible for identification of growth opportunities (84 percent of the executives we interviewed), strategic planning (82 percent), and M&A and divestments (82 percent). Other common responsibilities include monitoring…
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Verizon Enterprise M&A
Look at the genealogy here, starting with our first move, the acquisition of MCI back in 2006. That provided us this very expansive global IP backbone network. [Then we moved] on to Cybertrust Managed Security capabilities in 2007, and then further on with Terremark in 2011, then a company called CloudSwitch, then Hughes Telematics, as…
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